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THE WITNESS OF SIN 



THE WITNESS OF SIN 



A THEODICY 



BY 
REV. NATHAN ROBINSON WOOD 

MEDFORD, MASS. 




New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



I 



Copyright, 1905, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



LIBRARY of COMGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

NOV 24 1905 

Copyright Entry 
CLASS (X XXc. No. 

/J/90 A 

COPY B. 






New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue 
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London : 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 






CONTENTS 

CHAPTBR PAGB 

I. God and Sin 9 

II. Evasions 20 

III. Facing the Problem 43 

IV. The Problem of God's Goodness . . 60 

V. The Problem of God's Power ... 73 

VI. The Power of God and the Theodicy . 97 

VII. The Creative Principle .... 114 

VIII. The Witness of Sin 136 



INTRODUCTION 

If there were not the strongest ties of natural 
affection as well as the bonds of Christian love 
between the author of this book and myself, 
I might speak more freely than propriety will 
now permit me. 

Inability to reconcile the goodness of God 
with the existence of sin and all its dire con- 
sequences in this world where God is both 
immanent and transcendent has staggered 
many a soul and clouded its faith with doubt. 

It seems to me that no difficulty in this most 
abstruse problem has been evaded in this dis- 
cussion. Sophistries and casuistries have been 
stripped off and thrown aside. The real dif- 
ficulties have been uncovered and met. 

If the conclusions of this book are true, and 
I believe that they are, we may w r ell thank 
God and take courage. 

The riddle of Samson will have a new solu- 

7 



8 INTRODUCTION 

tion when applied to the existence of sin in 
the universe, 

"Out of the eater came forth food 
And out of the strong came forth sweetness." 

Nathan E. Wood. 

The President's House, 
The Newton Theological Institution, 
August, 1905. 



THE WITNESS OF SIN 

i 

GOD AND SIN 

NO apology or preface is needed for the 
subject of sin in the world. Of all 
the problems which force themselves 
upon us as we look at human life, this is the 
greatest and most insistent. The evils of the 
world need no vivid and elaborate setting 
forth. They are the commonplace of rhetoric, 
and they speak for themselves with a thousand 
voices. But that which makes sin, with its 
myriad evils in society, in characters, in for- 
tunes, the supreme problem of human life, is 
not the mere consequences of sin, awful as 
those are. That which makes sin not only the 
practical problem of life, but the supreme prob- 
lem of the reason, is the fact that sin, this 
universal and vital reality, is in strange and 
terrible conflict with the supreme reality, which 
is God. In this defiance of God by sin lies the 
real problem. Sin is, and God is ; but how can 

o 



10 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

both be in the same world? Each may seem 
to deny the other, but the danger of the prob- 
lem is that, to many, sin seems to deny God. 
To many others it is a cloud upon the blaze 
of His existence ; and to all it is the profound- 
est problem contained in human life. The 
existence of a supreme, a Divine, an all-good 
and all-powerful Being, is the hope of the 
world. But if God is the quest of the ages, 
sin is the barrier of the ages. No problem or 
perplexity, nothing except the actual working 
of sin itself in their own souls, has kept so 
many from seeing God as has this problem 
of sin in His world. 

Some sort of a theodicy, some showing of 
the way in which sin may exist in the world 
of an all-good and all-powerful God, becomes 
a necessity, at least in any religious thinking. 
The two highest of undivine religions have 
made a theodicy their framework. Buddhism 
fantastically represents the world as the evil 
sloughed off from a good deity, and as des- 
tined, with the dying of evil, to be reabsorbed 
into deity, and to cease to exist. Zoroastrian- 



GOD AND SIN 11 

ism made its theism a theodicy, depicting the 
world as held in a gigantic balance of Good 
and Evil, Ormuzd and Ahriman, each a deity, 
with good victorious in the end. In the Bible 
we find no framework of theodicy, for the pur- 
pose of the Bible is to do what no uninspired 
religion has done, to deal with the practical 
problem of sin, by showing man a way out 
from sin. But except that it reveals infinite 
truth about God and about sin, the Bible states 
the problem of theodicy but once, in the Book 
of Job, where it shows as its sublime solution 
the overwhelming majesty of God and our 
own ignorance of His ways. Butler's " An- 
alogy," written in the light of the whole Bible 
and of modern intellect, presents the same ar- 
gument in the profoundest rational form. 
" Paradise Lost " and Augustine's " City of 
God " have made other aspects of the problem 
a part of the world's thought. In the largest 
sense these mighty works are theodicies. 
But they have not sought to give a specific 
answer to the direct question of theodicy, 
" How can sin and an all-powerful God be 



12 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

in the same world? " With the Bible, and 
after it the "Analogy/' to show the folly 
of doubt because of sin; with the Bible, and 
after it " Paradise Lost/' to show how sin 
entered the world ; with the Bible, and after it 
the " City of God/' to show God's dealing with 
sin in the world ; — people still ask the question 
of theodicy, of the nature of God, the goodness 
and power of God, in view of sin. 

A specific answer to that question has not 
been given, and to-day we face the problem 
more plainly than ever. For a time indeed 
the thinking world has left the theistic prob- 
lems of the days of Leibnitz, Voltaire, Ed- 
wards, and Butler, and has been drawn away 
by the advance of physical science to what is 
not a problem, but a battle of opinions, the 
question of natural and supernatural. But 
while that conflict, like every conflict of opin- 
ions, has left both sides about where they were 
before, it has brought both sides back to the 
problem which has never ceased to be fore- 
most in the popular mind, the problem of sin 
and God in the world. For there has arisen, 



GOD AND SIN 13 

as a result of the generalisations of science, a 
tendency to look at things in a cosmic way, to 
think of the race rather than of individuals, of 
the world rather than the race, and of the 
universe rather than of this particular world. 
And this cosmic thought, this largest view 
of God's working in the world, brings us face 
to face with the great unsolved problem of the 
days of theistic and atheistic strife. In this 
large plan of God in the world sin presents 
itself, a universal apparition, a defiant and un- 
deniable reality. To every theist this becomes 
a supreme question. We have had in these 
days of science a vision of the Divine order 
almost Pauline in its sweep. What is the 
place of sin in this order? We behold, we 
think, as never before, the hand of God in 
nature. Where is the hand of God in sin? 
It may be said of this problem of theodicy, if 
it may ever be said of any problem, that it 
demands solution, for it belongs to actual life. 
We do not have to evolve it for ourselves, like 
certain problems of criticism, over which many 
dervishes whirl themselves frantic. It forces 



14 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

itself upon us. Neither is it bewildered by the 
" anise and cummin " of dates and styles and 
words. It is as broad as the universe and as 
deep as human life. It is indeed the most 
human, the least abstract, of all the problems 
of philosophy. For this reason there is no 
problem which perplexes so many of the peo- 
ple who do not claim to be thinkers, but who 
nevertheless think, as this question of the 
existence of sin in the world. Even the 
thoughtless pause to ask it. It is a universal 
abstraction of the most concrete form. It 
is a paradox which actually exists. While 
abstruse, divine philosophy retires to its 
grove and strictly meditates the " highest 
good " or the " first principle," common phi- 
losophy, in the street and in the home, is ever 
propounding this problem, which stares one in 
the face: "How can sin and God both be 
true? How can they be in the same world? " 
There is no other enigma in philosophy, divine 
or undivine, of which the world so strictly de- 
mands a solution, for the problem demands it 
of the world. There are problems in religion 



GOD AND SIN 15 

which are made what they are by the element 
of infinity, which are forever seen by the soul, 
but not grasped by the intelligence. The mys- 
tery of the Three in One is of this nature, 
and the mystery of fixed fate and free will. 
These parallels meet only in eternity. But 
perspective plays no part in the mystery of sin 
in the world. It is not a discrepancy, or a 
gulf, between God and sin ; it is a conflict, and 
a shock of meeting. And this meeting-point 
is not far off, beyond the ultimate outpost of 
our thought. It lies within our own experi- 
ence. Sin meets God in our own souls. 

It is undoubtedly true that the problem of 
evil is more likely to present itself to the stu- 
dent of the natural world or to the average 
man as a problem of natural evil, of pain, suf- 
fering, misfortune, sickness, and death. We 
are all more puzzled over the evil which we 
suffer than over the evil which we do. But all 
the problems of evil rest upon the problem of 
sin, and are explained by sin. 

For the injustice and oppression which are 
in the world, the inequalities of fortune, the 



16 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

wicked prospering, the righteous failing, inno- 
cence trampled upon and virtue cast down by 
vice, — " and captive Good attending captain 
III," — all these things, which are to many per- 
sons the problem of life, are simply aspects of 
the question of defiant sin: sin prospered and 
triumphant for a time, for it is only for a time, 
in defiance of God, — the sinful and the wicked 
striking down the virtuous and oppressing the 
innocent, in defiance of Divine justice. 

And what we call natural evil, such as pain, 
misery, sickness, the scientist sees as the direct 
or indirect result of moral evil in ourselves, or 
in our ancestors, or in society at large. The 
Scriptures add to this summing up of the 
natural evils which are the harvest of sin, that 
sin is the seed of death. But if natural evil 
may undoubtedly be traced to sin as its source, 
this but adds to the burden of the problem of 
sin. 

Beyond this, natural evil reveals itself 
clearly to modern eyes as a punitive force. In 
pain, misery, and privation, even in an earth 
discordant in her fairest scenes, sown with 



GOD AND SIN 17 

suffering, and red with blood, moral order ap- 
pears at its corrective work. Purifying power 
blows in it like a destroying wind through 
miasms. He is blind who to-day cannot see 
in natural evil the divine order of the universe 
asserting itself against sin. But sin, with this 
divine machinery of trouble arrayed against 
it, is more a problem than ever. What shall 
we say of that which calls for the correction, 
which needs the punishment, which leaves the 
debris to be purified? What shall we say of 
that sin against which the divine order of the 
universe must assert itself? Sin stands a 
blacker mystery than ever in the light which 
shines through natural evil. It is not hard for 
the theist to see, back of natural evil, God, 
arraying the universe against moral evil. A 
recent writer * has drawn the philosophy of 
natural evil into a phrase and set forth God's 
personal relations to natural evil, when he says : 
" Suffering is God's protest against sin." But 
what shall we say of sin ? In this tremendous 
indictment of sin by the voice of all natural 
evil, appears more awful than ever the power 

1 Principal Fairbairn. 



18 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

and antagonism of that sin against which God 
must protest! 

This problem of sin, though it lies in man's 
nature, is far more profound than the problem 
of the origin of sin in man. It is indeed 
strange that man could have sinned. For we 
cannot believe that God created man with sin, 
or the seeds of sin, in him. How then did sin 
begin in a sinless being? But we can point to 
the free will of man, which explains how man 
could have sinned, if not why he should have 
sinned. Sin was not impossible to man. This 
problem is shallow beside the deeper problem 
of sin and God. A sinless being, with free- 
dom of will, has power to sin, and the occur- 
rence of sin in the soul of a being who, though 
sinless, had power to choose between love of 
God and love of sin, is immeasurably less 
mysterious than the occurrence of sin in the 
world of a God who must forever hate sin. 

This problem of sin is also in every way 
more vital than the question of the origin of 
sin in man. For tracing the origin of sin 
cannot change the fact of sin. Sin, however 



GOD AND SIN 19 

it got here, is here, and the real and vital ques- 
tion before men is, not how sin got here, but 
how to get rid of it. But in order to get rid 
of it, God is necessary ; and the problem is that 
sin, by its presence in His world, obscures God, 
and to some seems even to deny Him. It is 
a question not of our past, but of our future, 
because it is a question of God. Sin has 
already affected the nature of man; shall we 
let it affect the nature of God for us? Shall 
we let it raise an unanswered question of the 
goodness and power of God ? God, by the very 
idea of God, must be perfect in goodness, but 
sin in His world is evil. He must be perfect 
in power, but sin defies Him. This problem of 
theodicy, of defiant sin and God, arising out 
of the actual world, from the conflict of these 
two great realities in our own souls, intensified 
by the revealing light of natural evil, and 
swallowing up the question of the origin of 
evil, is the most insistent, the most vital, the 
most profound, and indeed the only, problem 
which stands between our intelligence and 
God. 



II 

EVASIONS 

WHEN this question, " How can sin 
and God both be in the same 
world?" presents itself, there are 
many who would meet it by evasion. And the 
only way to do this is to deny that God and sin 
do both exist. Which of the two one denies 
depends mostly upon things outside of one's 
self. A mind prone to see but one thing at 
a time, or inclined to meet problems by evasion, 
may equally well become pessimist or pantheist. 
If such a mind is brought up in an atmosphere 
of naturalism or of materialism, it easily meets 
the appearance of sin by denying the existence 
of God. If such a mind has been cradled in the 
church or fed upon a mild philosophy, it gets 
faith by denying the reality of sin. Such pes- 
simism, which is atheism, and such optimism, 
which is pantheism, are kith and kin. They 



EVASIONS 21 

are both of them evasions of the great prob- 
lem of the world. 

Atheism is no longer what it once was as a 
compact force and a definite theory. The glit- 
ter of Voltaire, the sword-play of Bayle, the 
lucid fallacies of Hume, are not of our day. 
It is a far cry, even from such thinking as 
theirs, to that recent well-paid apostle of athe- 
ism, the climax of whose philosophy was the 
question, superfluous to all who knew the work 
of the questioner, " If the devil should die, 
would God make another ?" Atheism, at the 
present day, if it is to be found in the form of 
thought, must be looked for rather in the guise 
of extreme agnosticism or of the theatrical 
pessimism of Schopenhauer. Pessimism is in 
fact the real atheism of to-day, and pessimism 
is an atheism which, unlike the older atheism, 
is founded entirely upon the evil which is in 
the world. In Schopenhauer this theme of evil 
in the world plays second part to a strange and 
gigantic self-conceit. But in his followers, 
such as von Hartmann, the denial of God 
because of evil is the burden of their pessimism. 



22 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

The world is very bad, and there is, therefore, 
no God; there is only a blind and remorseless 
Will. As a recent writer has well said, they 
talk as though they had made the world, long 
ago in their youth, but had well repented of 
it. Such a denial of God is to any rational 
mind simply a weak evasion of the supreme 
problem of God and sin. It is no more irra- 
tional than the denial of the reality of sin, 
but it is more foolish from the practical point 
of view, for it loses all that could be gained by 
an evasion. One may seek, even by evasion, 
to see beyond dispute the existence of God; 
but no one cares for the undisputed existence 
of sin. 

If we are seeking a theodicy, or an opti- 
mism based upon the facts in the case, atheism 
and pessimism do not lie in our road. We 
shall have dealt with them sufficiently if we 
find the answer to them in a solution of the 
problem. But the kind of false optimism which 
rests on a denial of the reality of sin does en- 
cumber the way to a true and reasoned opti- 
mism or to a true theodicy. The optimism of 



EVASIONS 23 

a true theodicy cannot be confused by pessi- 
mism, but it may be by false optimism. One 
is not obliged to clear away this false optimism, 
yet for the sake of the best understanding of 
the problem it is well to analyse these evasions 
of the problem by the denial of sin. 

Those whose faith is not strong enough to 
lay hold upon God in spite of sin, and whose 
moral sense is so weak that sin in themselves 
does not lead them to the realisation of God, 
may find the denial of sin almost a necessity 
of the religious life. Of these there is little 
to be said. It is a personal matter with them, 
a necessity of their weakness. But wherever 
the denial of sin is set forth as a philosophy of 
the universe, it takes its place in a strange 
harmony by the side of pessimism, the atheism 
which is founded on evil, as a twin evasion of 
the problem of sin and God. We need not of 
course force this kinship too far, and try to 
make it identity. For the complete parallel to 
the belief that there is no perfect Being above 
is the belief that there is no imperfection here 
below, and very few would deny that there 



24 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

is at least some imperfection in human society. 
The denial of sin comes rather in the affirma- 
tion that there is no sin in the positive sense, 
as a moral evil defiantly and successfully op- 
posing itself to God. Sin is explained as a 
negative thing, as a natural evil, as an imper- 
fection. It stands no longer as the antithesis 
of God. 

Probably the extreme form of this view is 
found in that theory of the world which we call 
pantheism. Pantheism knows no evil in the 
world, as atheism knows no God. Pantheism 
has, however, its own ends before it, and its 
view of sin springs less from a conscious de- 
sire to evade the problem of evil than from a 
philosophy oblivious to aught but itself. Cer- 
tain forms of pantheism, which might almost 
equally well be called atheism, see no defiant 
evil in sin because they see no personal moral 
Being to defy. Those, however, like Spinoza, 
whose pantheism is theistic, who, to put it 
roughly, would not put everything in place of 
God, but would see God as the essence of all 
things, are equally forced to exclude sin as a 



EVASIONS 25 

reality from their divinely-intoxicated uni- 
verse. Sin may somehow be in a world which 
belongs to God, but it cannot be in a world 
which is a part of God. God and sin may both 
be true, but pantheism and sin certainly can- 
not. Therefore the pantheist denies sin, and 
therefore also the world denies pantheism. 

Next after pantheism the place in philosophy 
from which the denial of the reality of sin has 
been most often drawn is the Theodicee of 
Leibnitz, perhaps the most celebrated of all 
treatises upon the problem of sin. Leibnitz 
is one of the great names in philosophy, one 
in the line of hundred-handed geniuses, with 
Aristotle, Leonardo, Bacon, and Goethe. In 
his Theodicee, the fruit of a mind and temper 
unique for boldness, confidence and brilliance, 
ideas, arguments, metaphors, and illustrations 
crowd one another. The result is that side by 
side with a truly sublime conception and a 
really profound argument he has left many 
vague phrases about sin as " imperfection " or 
" limitation," which obscure the large struc- 
ture of his thought. The great idea of the 



26 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

Theodicee was that this world is the " best 
possible world." Now evil is in this world, 
and the presence and permission of evil here 
must be explained before it becomes clear that 
this is the best possible world. Leibnitz 
showed by analysis how evil could have come 
into the world. Man is finite. Metaphysic- 
ally he falls short of infinite completeness or 
perfection. This limitation inborn in finite 
power, intellect, knowledge, Leibnitz calls met- 
aphysical imperfection. Physical evil he ex- 
plained as conditionally a good, not good in 
itself, but good seen in its context in the book 
of human life, where it appears as a corrective 
of sin. But this moral evil, or sin, which is 
not mere finiteness, and beside which natural 
evil is a good, was the real problem before him. 
And Leibnitz argued that moral evil is the re- 
sult of this finite imperfection as it affects 
the moral nature. From this argument there 
grew many eloquent phrases about moral evil 
as " imperfection," or " limitation," or a 
" mere failure of perfectness." In this of 
course he confounded quality and quantity. 






evasions n 

The moral nature need not be infinite in quan- 
tity in order to be perfect in quality, that is, to 
be good. Nevertheless these phrases, the rhet- 
oric of Leibnitz, have flown far more widely 
than his sober thought has gone. The thought 
of Leibnitz is that this finite imperfec- 
tion, which works in all man's nature, 
works especially in the will of man. In the 
will of man, evil, before but a limitation of 
being, becomes moral, defies God, and is sin. 
The human will, he declares, is the source of 
sin, and finite limitation is but the occasion of 
it. Otherwise God, who is the author of this 
limitation, is responsible for sin. But Leib- 
nitz declares that God in no way created sin; 
for while sin is made possible by this finite 
limitation, nothing but a will can give sin 
reality; it cannot be God's will which does 
this ; it is man's will, which sins in defiance of 
God. This is the main point of his argument 
about the origin of evil as it concerns the 
Creator. To show how sin could begin in a 
being created sinless, he finds some such in- 
fluence as finite imperfection a necessity. But 



28 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

this would but charge the Creator of the finite 
soul with being the creator of sin, did Leib- 
nitz not throw his strongest emphasis upon the 
fact that sin, made possible by finiteness, is 
itself wholly the work of the human will, a 
direct and positive evil, a defiance, not an in- 
complete attainment, of righteousness. 

All this is, however, but a part of his more 
famous theory in regard to the present per- 
mission of sin in the world. Looking not at 
man's nature alone, but at the world at large, 
he declares that evil is necessary to the " pre- 
established harmony " of the universe. In it- 
self not good, it is necessary as a foil to that 
which is good, and which without its foil 
would not be perfect. Sin is the shadow, the 
darkness, without whose contrast the light 
would lose half its brightness. This rhetoric, 
though not new in itself, nor in its idea of 
sin as a necessary part of a divine harmony, 
took original and logical form in his celebrated 
argument that this world is the " best possible 
world," because the " best possible world " is 
one containing sin. This greatest conception 



EVASIONS 29 

of Leibnitz is not, as many who employ it now 
seem to think, simply an enthusiastic and de- 
fiant yelp of optimism in the face of sin. By 
it Leibnitz means, and this is the greatest de- 
velopment of his Theodicee, that the " best 
possible world " is a moral world, one contain- 
ing " morality," or moral agents, and in such 
a world there is always a possibility of sin. 
He does not say of the best possible world, 
as he said of his pre-established harmony, that 
sin is necessary to it. He says only that sin is 
a necessary possibility in it. For where there 
are free wills, God cannot absolutely prevent 
sin. Sin may come to pass in such a best 
world, as it has in this one, in spite of God, 
and God is not to be blamed for it. The 
whole argument rests then upon moral de- 
fiance of God as the real nature of sin, and 
here is his whole explanation of sin. The 
origin of sin is not with God, but in the free 
will of man in defiance of God. Sin's con- 
tinued presence in the world is not to be made 
a charge against God, since it is here because 
the free will sins in spite of God. And the 



30 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

creation of such a world with such free wills 
in it is not a cloud upon God's goodness, since 
such a world, with free agents in it, is the best 
possible world. The argument of the Theo- 
dicee turns at every point then upon the fact 
that sin is positive moral evil, born of the free 
will in defiance of God. But the mind of 
Leibnitz was a restless and ardent one. He 
desired to storm the problem with every wea- 
pon at once. His great argument moves in a 
cloud of phrases about " limitation," " imper- 
fection/' "negations," "shadows." And his 
very phrase, " sin as a part of the best world," 
which to him means wholly that sin defies God 
in the best world, is taken by the thoughtless, 
and by the wilful, to mean that sin as a part 
of the best world is itself not really evil. 

But the idea of sin as a negation, an im- 
perfect existence of good, or a mere absence 
of good, does not depend upon Leibnitz, nor 
for that matter upon any philosophy, or even 
upon logic. It has its own philosophy, which 
consists of illustrations, some of which have 
done long and hard service down to the present 






EVASIONS 31 

day. Sin, it is said, is not positive moral evil, 
but a mere negation; not a force, but an ab- 
sence. It is like cold, the absence of heat. It 
is like shadow, the absence of light. It is a 
vacuum, where good is not. These, which are 
merely illustrations of an evasion of a great 
reality, do not in themselves deserve much at- 
tention. But they are so common, and so 
often take the place of reason and logic, that 
it may be well to consider what force they 
really have. Now illustrations have not the 
force of proofs unless they are analogies as 
well as illustrations. These illustrations of 
shadow and cold and vacuum set forth a con- 
dition of negation, from which positive force, 
light, or heat, is gone. They show then what 
is meant when it is said that sin is a mere nega- 
tion. But they do not show that sin is itself 
such a negation as cold and shadow are, unless 
they do so by analogy. And there is no force 
of analogy in them in that direction. For 
used as analogies, as anyone may use them, 
they on the contrary sweep away all idea of 
sin as negation. Is sin really not a positive 



32 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

evil force, but only an absence of the good 
divine force? What causes the absence then? 
Is sin merely a vacuum of goodness? Ma- 
terial nature abhors a vacuum, and Divine 
Nature and goodness must at least equally ab- 
hor one; it must have come to pass in spite 
of them; what defiant thing causes the 
vacuum? Is evil like shadow, the absence of 
light? What then casts the shadow from be- 
fore the Divine righteous light ? Is evil like 
cold, the absence of heat? What is it which 
stops at one point the heat of Divine love 
which floods the universe? Something real 
must cast the shadow and chill the heat. That 
something, whatever it is, is sin. Two nega- 
tives make a positive, say the grammarians. 
It takes two positives to make a negative in a 
real and positive world. It takes a positive 
of tremendous power to cause a negation of a 
positive God anywhere in His universe. If 
sin is the negation of good, it must be a very 
real and positive existence. It must be, as 
Augustine says, a negation as fire is a nega- 
tion. It creates the vacuum of goodness in 



EVASIONS 33 

which it dwells. It casts its own shadow. It 
is foolish to say that sin is but the shadow, 
which something else casts, for if something 
else casts the shadow, that something else, 
which stops the light of God, or rather that 
stoppage itself, is the sin. The sin which does 
all this is in defiant opposition toward God. 
For a negation cannot be in a positive uni- 
verse of positive Power and Love without 
positive opposition to that Power and Love — 
and, in fact, successful opposition, since, if un- 
successful, it could not exist. No deeper de- 
scription can be given of the terrible antag- 
onism of sin toward God than this, that sin, 
wherever it exists, casts a shadow from His 
light, and dispels the warmth of His love, 
and is the negation of His righteousness. 

These phrases about sin as negation were 
very dear to that school of pantheists whose 
prophet was Emerson. Not a great figure in 
himself, Emerson is the best representative of 
the optimism which rests wholly upon the 
denial of sin. For those who deny sin often 
draw their optimism from the nature, the 



34 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

love, and the universal presence of God. 
Emerson on the other hand bases nothing 
upon the nature and the presence of God, and 
indeed says very little about God. His opti- 
mism is based upon the perfection and the glory 
of human nature, and has for its corner stone 
the creed that " evil is merely privative, not ab- 
solute," or that it is only so much " nonentity." 
But this creed was itself a little too much a 
negation or a nonentity for a foundation of 
his optimism, and he strengthened it, or at 
least filled it out, by the positive doctrine, 
which he had partly from his masters before 
him, partly from his own temperament, that 
sin is good. Sin, it seems to him, is a posi- 
tive good in its results, and even in itself. 
Every sin, he said, is an incident on the up- 
ward path. Man grows sinless by the simple 
method of committing sins, and so being done 
with them. Man's crimes and misdeeds are 
the processes through which he passes to 
higher life. Sin is a growth toward goodness. 
The evil spirits are on the road to heaven. 
" Man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gib- 



EVASIONS 35 

bets, is on his way to all that is good and true." 
Most amiably, and with no real personal in- 
tention, Emerson declares with Satan in 
" Paradise Lost," " Evil, be thou my good." 

Emerson had no desire to pose as a logical 
thinker, nor, in the strictest sense, a<s a philoso- 
pher. Sifting out from the mass of his quo- 
tations the ideas which were his own, one 
finds that they are rather intuitions, percep- 
tions, feelings, than ideas. In other words, he 
meant to be, and is called, a seer, and as such 
he was typical of a certain class of optimists, 
mystics, minor poets, and vague pantheists, 
who deny the reality of sin, and who are called 
seers, doubtless because they are not reasoners. 
Very different from them in their vision of 
sin, and from Emerson, who could not see sin 
and said very little of any vision of God, are 
the true seers of the race, who see sin because 
it is real, and see God because He is real, and 
see both with a vividness beyond the habit of 
common men. Such were the sacred seers. 
The more rapt their vision of God became, the 
sterner grew their sense of sin, the more burn- 



36 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

ing their words, the heavier the burden of 
their prophecy. Such were the secular seers 
of the race, the great poets, — Homer, with his 
Iliad of woes, of battle, and of wrath, — Dante, 
with his circles of fire and of frost, and his 
steeps of Purgatory, — Shakespeare, master of 
all the deeps of tragedy, passion, and guilt, — 
and Milton, whose theme was the entrance of 
sin and ruin into the world. They were seers, 
not dreamers. And with them are the trage- 
dians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and 
their successors, whose theme is the punish- 
ment of sin. And even Goethe, the poet of 
pantheism, rose to master-greatness only when 
he traced, in Faust, the struggle of the human 
soul, and the course of sin and its outcome, 
and fell again from that high company when 
in his second Faust he returned to his pan- 
theism. It is time that we, the heirs of these 
ages, ceased to give the name of seer to those 
whose only title to it is that they cannot see. 
As for Emerson and his paradox that sin 
is good because its results are good, and be- 
cause we grow upward by it, the best and the 



evasions m 

only needed* criticism is close at hand, in Emer- 
son himself. If man grows better by evil, 
and every sin makes him, not more sinful, but 
less sinful, every descent raises, not lowers 
him, how did Emerson himself in his quiet, 
domestic, religious life come to the good 
character he had? And how does the man 
who passes through successive stages of de- 
ceit, lying, petty stealing, ruffianism, house- 
breaking, violent robbery, and murder, and 
from impure thought, through impure deed, to 
constant lust, debauchery, and riot of senses, 
come at the end to character so low morally 
and spiritually? 

Emerson's thought, except that which he 
quoted, is not the kind which belongs to every 
age and generation. The virtue or vice, for 
us, in his theory of sin, is that it has outlasted 
all his good advice and his high-strung ecsta- 
sies, and that his phrases about sin, at once the 
basis and the weakest point of his philosophy, 
are the catchwords of to-day. For the theory 
of moral evolution, which in its extreme form 
has taken the place of Transcendentalism, is 



/ 



38 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

Emerson's idea of upward growth through 
evil, expanded into a whole philosophy of the 
universe. Emerson's idea, and the theory 
called by the name of evolution, are indeed but 
the one and old idea, common to all ages, of 
a world perfected, or saved, or whatever one 
will, by mere process of growth. This natural 
fallacy of the human heart has seized the idea 
of evolution and bent it to its own ends. The 
race of men, it says, is steadily rising, one 
generation upon another, toward perfection. 
" Sin is the brute-inheritance " which we carry 
with us from our earthy origin. War, 
murder, lust, cruelty, crime, and misery are 
incidentals in the upward process through 
which the race attains at last the perfected con- 
dition which is " salvation." Or, in its partly 
Christian form, this view reads that through 
this vast evolutionary process God's infinite will 
is working out His universal plan. In the 
midst of this process we sin. But our sin, 
aimed against God though it may be, is but a 
part of His vast scheme, in which even sin is 
an accepted process. All things, good or bad, 



EVASIONS 39 

are working together to this great consum- 
mation of a race grown at last into perfect 
and divine life. It is clear that all this gives 
room for varying views of sin. The view 
which comes nearest to Christian doctrine, for 
instance, is that sin is an undeniable evil, an 
unavoidable part in the process, which God 
permits as a means of greater good. This is 
the only real theodicy of evolution worthy of 
study in its own place, and by no means 
meant for a denial of the reality of sin. But 
the evolutionist who, like the most popular 
teachers of the philosophy, is at most a theist 
or pantheist, and has imbibed no religious 
hatred of the idea of sin, looks upon sin as a 
mere incidental in the evolutionary process. 
Sin is to him really a good, leading us upward, 
or at the worst it is but imperfection, with the 
hope of perfection in it. The sins which seem 
obstacles are but stepping-stones, and every 
fall, as John Fiske says, is a fall upward. It is 
in tune with Emerson's theme, that the evil 
spirits are on their way toward heaven, and 
that mankind is advancing through gibbets 



40 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

and jails to the good and the true. This is 
the end. Many in all ages have tried to think 
that sin is not evil. The theory that sin is a 
means of good is old. But there remains the 
last denial of sin, that sin is not evil, but a 
positive good. This is the death of reason, 
and the burial of ethics. 

Little need be said of this last denial of sin. 
If sin is a positive good, why is the perfected 
race without it? Why must it not remain to 
keep the race in its perfected state, having 
once brought it there? If sin is not hateful 
to God, why is He leading the race through 
toil and travail so immense and infinite out of 
it? If sins are stepping-stones upward for the 
race, why are they steps downward for the 
individual? If every fall is a fall upward, 
why does the individual go downward in his 
fall ? If continued sin helps to bring the race 
into light, why does it bring the individual to 
ruin of body and black despair of soul? The 
climax of the denial of God is the creed of the 
pessimist, that God, if there be a God, is evil. 
The climax of the denial of sin is that sin, 



EVASIONS 41 

which defies God, is good. In these para- 
doxes reason goes mad. " The fool," it was 
declared, " hath said in his heart, ' There is no 
God ; ' " no one had as yet thought to deny the 
reality of sin. The moral result of both fol- 
lies is the same. Atheism, it has been said, if 
it could be made universal and practical, would 
destroy society, for it would destroy morality. 
Certainly the same is even more plainly true 
of the denial of the reality of sin. If it could 
be made universal and practical, it would de- 
stroy all law, all restraint, all ethics, all moral- 
ity. Society would evolve itself through un- 
hindered crime into chaos and death. 

But worse than the moral result of either 
folly of denial is the rational result. The 
great problem of sin and God cannot be evaded 
save at the ruin of all reason and certainty. 
If we deny the reality of God, whose existence 
is a universal intuition of the race, can we be 
sure that it is not our own reason which has 
lost its hold upon realities ? And on the other 
hand, if we declare that the universal con- 
sciousness of sin, so visible in and about us, is 



42 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

at fault, how can we trust the universal con- 
sciousness, or our own consciousness, of God, 
whom we cannot touch or see ? Reason feeds 
upon realities, and without them it dies. He 
who denies God or sin declares himself blind. 
He is no guide for the great problem. If 
there is a passage, as there must be, between 
the power of God and the power of sin, those 
Cyanean rocks which continually meet and 
shake the world, these blind guides are not the 
pilots for it. Atheism will be wrecked at last 
upon the indignant power of God, and blind 
optimism will be dashed, after a life of bland 
and lulled belief, upon the deadly rock of sin. 



Ill 

FACING THE PROBLEM 

THE only thing to do with so great a 
problem as that of sin and God is to 
face it. Nothing of permanence, ex- 
cept perhaps one's own fate, will ever be 
brought to pass by denying God or sin. If we 
would seek either a solution of the problem or 
a rational attitude toward it, we must face the 
problem fairly and admit the reality of the 
facts which constitute it. And this does not 
mean the careless attitude which does not deny 
these realities because it takes no thought at 
all in regard to them. We must face them 
seriously and sanely as realities. This is the 
attitude of reason and the only way to a true 
solution of the problem. 

If it were not that we can face this problem 
hopefully, even when we cannot penetrate it, 
we should be badly off indeed. But it is pos- 
sible to look upon it in a large and serious way , 

43 



44 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

grasping all the realities, and standing firm, by 
faith. Like the Gordian Knot, this problem 
must be either unravelled or cut, by one who 
desires mastery over the world of his own 
thinking. But faith cuts this knot, legiti- 
mately, and as by divine power. Faith is the 
strongest and most rational attitude which one 
can take in the presence of this problem. It 
is the opposite of that weakness of mind which 
must deny one or the other of the two great 
realities, of that spirit of despair which can- 
not believe in God because of sin, and of that 
other spirit of despair which cannot believe in 
Him unless it denies sin. Faith is the true 
realism, which believes in both visible realities. 
It has in this matter the same spirit with the 
truest science, for it acknowledges facts simply 
because they are facts, and before they are ex- 
plained. As Mephistopheles declared himself 
the " spirit that denies," so on the other hand 
faith is the spirit that affirms. It is this spirit 
of faith, of realism, of science, of honesty, 
which has cut the knot of our condition, even 
though, as Pascal says, " it takes its twists and 



FACING THE PROBLEM 45 

turns in the abyss." It is this highest reason, 
this faith in God in spite of sin, which has re- 
deemed the modern world from the despair of 
Greece and Rome. The wisest are those who 
live by faith, who can see the black expanse of 
sin and yet see that a God shines in the uni- 
verse. 

If this attitude of faith, of facing the prob- 
lem and acknowledging its realities, is the 
highest reason, it is not surprising that the 
best logical treatments of the problem of sin 
should consciously or unconsciously have been 
reasoned statements of faith. For faith in 
this case means not only religion, but reason 
and sanity. The best of all these reasoned 
statements of faith is Butler's, in his great 
" Analogy," especially as found in the seventh 
chapter : " Of the Government of God Con- 
sidered as a Scheme or Constitution Imper- 
fectly Comprehended." Analogy and reason 
show, he says, that as the natural scheme of 
things is beyond us at many points, so also we 
are ignorant of the complete outlines of the 
moral plan of God in this universe; and that 



46 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

so, knowing His love and righteousness, we 
must believe, and have no ground but ignor- 
ance for not believing, that this moral order, 
in which sin has to be a possibility, and is a 
reality, is for the best in God's infinite plan. 
" The analogy of His natural government sug- 
gests and makes it credible that His moral 
government must be a scheme quite beyond 
our comprehension ; and this affords a general 
answer to all objections against the justice 
and goodness of it." — " It is easy to see 
how our ignorance, as it is the common, is 
really a satisfactory answer to all objections 
against the justice and goodness of Provi- 
dence." 

This is evidently a logical statement of rea- 
son for trust in God in face of the mystery of 
sin. We do not know God's plan, but we do 
know His justice and goodness; and proceed- 
ing, in the only rational way, upon what we 
know, we must believe that God's plan is good 
and just, and that it is only our ignorance 
which keeps us from clearly seeing that it is so. 
On any ground this is unassailable logic. It 



FACING THE PROBLEM 47 

does not solve the mystery of sin, but it de- 
stroys any attacks, which the sight of sin may 
inspire, upon the goodness and justice of God. 
It shows that only ignorance can assail God, 
and reveals faith as the very highest attitude 
of reason. 

And we find the rational attitude consciously 
expressed again, in somewhat rigidly Calvin- 
istic form, by perhaps the profoundest and 
most comprehensive mind in America since 
Jonathan Edwards. " Our great ground of 
confidence, however, is the assurance that the 
Judge of all the earth must do right. Sin is, 
and God is; therefore the occurrence of sin 
must be consistent with His nature ; and as its 
occurrence cannot have been unforeseen or un- 
designed, God's purpose or decree that it 
should occur must be consistent with His holi- 
ness/ J ! This setting forth of the rational at- 
titude toward God is less satisfactory than 
Butler's, because it attempts to make the argu- 
ment explain the cause of sin, and nothing is 
more characteristic of what Gladstone called 
the " integrity " of Butler than his unfailing 
1 Hodge: Theology, 



48 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

knowledge of how much an argument would 
prove. 

But while we find the attitude of faith and 
of facing the problem consciously expressed 
by one or two, we find it more often uncon- 
sciously expressed, as for instance in a recent 
able work, 2 where it is put not as a statement of 
the reasonableness of faith, but as a theory of 
theodicy. The argument in that work is that 
since God is infinite Reason, and works accord- 
ing to laws of wisdom and love, we may be 
certain that if He does not prevent sin it is 
because He cannot in accordance with those 
laws. This is in reality a very clear presenta- 
tion of the rationale of faith in God, and, as 
such, is better than many a mistaken theory of 
theodicy, but it is not itself a theory of theodicy, 
and does not, as it claims, " explode the di- 
lemma" of sin, except by faith. For it is a 
statement of belief that God has good reason, 
in the law of His nature, for not preventing sin. 
If it stated what that reason is, and how it 
affects the law of God's nature, it would be a 
2 Harris: "God Creator and Lord of all." 



FACING THE PROBLEM 49 

theory of theodicy. As it is, it is what is next 
best to a true theory of theodicy, a setting forth 
of the only rational attitude toward God. 

This same reason, of faith in God, has been 
the vital principle of the three most complete 
attempts that have been made at an ordered 
theodicy. The first of these is the Theodiccc 
of Leibnitz. The large Optimism of Leibnitz 
beheld God, the all-good and all-wise, plan- 
ning the world, and selecting, out of the end- 
less number of worlds which existed in idea, 
one, which was the best possible world, and 
which He caused to exist in reality. And 
though sin exists in this world, yet we must 
believe, and we cannot deny or disprove, that 
this world, since God selected it, is the best 
world possible. This is the rational and con- 
sistent optimism of the Tlieodicee, and, in its 
breadth and philosophic structure, irradiated 
by genius, it still stands alone. This optimism 
is not itself a theory of theodicy, and when 
Leibnitz came to construct a theodicy upon it, 
and to explain how this is the best possible 
world, as one containing morality and hence 



50 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

the possibility of sin, be brought up against 
the question, which he left not really answered, 
of the actual Divine permission of sin in this 
best world. But leaving apart his theory of 
theodicy, as an ordered statement of the ra- 
tionale of faith in God in His world his Op- 
timism is the noblest in all philosophy. 

The next noticeable attempt at a theodicy 
much resembles the outward aspect of this 
idea of the best possible world as a world with 
sin in it. It came, however, not from the 
Theodicee, but from extreme Calvinism as it 
dwelt in the minds of Hopkins and Bellamy, 
the friends of Jonathan Edwards. Hopkins 
argues that this " must be the wisest and best 
possible plan, containing all the possible good 
that infinite wisdom and goodness could devise 
and desire, and omnipotence execute." This 
optimism goes on to crystallise itself into a 
of theodicy as follows. " There is, 
therefore, the greatest possible certainty, from 
the divine perfections, that sin does exist just 
in the manner and in that degree, and in every 
instance of it, with all the attendants and con- 



UjJUlUI 

\ theory 



FACING THE PROBLEM 51 

sequents of it which do or will take place, 
agreeably to the dictates of Infinite Wisdom 
and Goodness, as being necessary to accom- 
plish the most wise and best end, the greatest 
possible good of the universe." And Bellamy 
adds, " Were there no particular instance in 
which we could see the wisdom of God in the 
permission of sin, yet from the perfections of 
the Divine nature alone, we have such full 
evidence that he must always act in the wisest 
and best manner, as that we ought not in the 
least to doubt it." There is perhaps a mathe- 
matical certainty and infallibility about this 
which reminds one more of the " scientific 
method " of our own religious thought than 
of the largeness and humanity of Augustine 
or Leibnitz. It is faith drawing up a legal 
document and setting down the laws of the 
universe in it. And faith, when it advocates 
Divine permission of sin, and represents sin 
as the " necessary " means of the greatest 
good, turns rational optimism into a theory of 
theodicy, and into a very untenable as well as_J 
unappealing one. But in its birth this theory 



52 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

was an expression of rational faith in the wis- 
dom and goodness and power of God in face 
of sin. 

There is a much better and saner optimism 
in the suggestion of Dr. N. W. Taylor of Yale, 
that it may be that sin is possible here because 
it is an unavoidable possibility in the best moral 
system. This is less like the rhetoric of Leib- 
nitz about the best world being one with sin 
in it, than like the real idea of Leibnitz that the 
best world is one containing " morality " and 
hence the unavoidable possibility of sin. 
When this suggestion was made the basis of 
a theodicy at Andover, it failed to meet all 
the facts of the case and to solve the problem 
of sin in the world. But in the mind of its 
author the idea of sin as an unavoidable pos- 
sibility in the best moral system was simply an 
expression of rational belief that this moral 
system, in which sin exists, may be the best. 

This is an unassailable optimism. For the 
burden of proof is upon those who would deny 
that this is the best moral system. Butler in 
his classic argument in the "Analogy" lays this 



FACING THE PROBLEM 53 

burden of proof upon them when he shows 
that we have no ground but ignorance for 
doubting the wise and good plan of God in 
this world. And those who would deny the 
goodness and power of God have a burden 
which cannot be carried, for sin, which is no 
more real than God, cannot be used to disprove 
His existence. The true optimism which ac- 
knowledges sin because it is real, and acknowl- 
edges God because He is real, is the only honest 
or rational attitude to take in regard to the 
problem of sin and God. 

This rational optimism cannot, however, be 
taken as a solution of the problem. The prob- 
lem may not have to be solved. The faith of 
him who knows God may descend, like the 
Angel Michael against the dragon, and easily 
triumph by the touch of celestial temper over 
sin's denial of God. But it is a problem which 
is well worth removing, for at one time or an- 
other it troubles almost every mind. And to 
solve it we need more than the rational faith 
which sees both sin and God and sees God in 
spite of sin. Sin's seeming denial of God 



54 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

may have no real effectiveness, for God is as 
real as sin, and His undeniable existence may 
equally well be used to deny the existence of 
sin. But if we desire a solution of the prob- 
lem of sin, it is not enough to let the visible 
existence of God overcome sin's denial of Him. 
We must not only overcome but must remove 
sin's denial of Him, by showing that the exist- 
ence of sin in His world is not inconsistent 
with His goodness and power. We cannot do 
this by showing that His goodness and power 
are so great and so clear in general that they 
cannot be denied by sin's seeming denial. 
That is rational optimism. But we must show 
that God's goodness and power are not ques- 
tionable or uncertain in this particular case 
where they are challenged by sin. That will 
be a rational solution. 

Looking upon the problem itself in that 
rational way, there is one hypothesis in regard 
to the facts which is plainly out of the ques- 
tion. It is incredible, though we believe that 
God created His world, that God should be the 
author of sin. Such an hypothesis denies the 






FACING THE PROBLEM 55 

realities of the case, for it means either that 
God is not God, holy and perfect, or that sin is 
not sinful. We are thrown at once, then, 
upon the only possible explanation. This sin, 
which does not come from God, is not an im- 
personal thing, an abstraction, a being by itself, 
self-born and self-existent, roaming the world 
alone. It is human beings who sin. When 
we say that " sin defies God/' we mean that 
"sinners defy God." If sin is against God's 
will, it is because those who sin are sinning 
against God's will. Their wills are free 
enough and independent enough to sin in spite 
of God. No other hypothesis is possible un- 
less we deny the reality of sin as moral evil. 
Sin is not of God's will, and though we may 
ascribe much to the devil, or, as evolutionists, 
may demonise matter, sin is not something 
with a will of its own outside of us. It 
is the work or the working of man's 
will. It is hardly necessary to refer to 
consciousness, which declares in the soul, 
" It is I who sin my sin, and I am able 
to sin in spite of the will of God," or to 



56 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

the consciousness speaking morally in our 
conscience, which we can neither escape nor 
drive out, and which tells us that we are 
responsible for our sin. The evident logic of 
the case runs in the same way. For only a 
will can defy a will ; a mere existence without 
a will cannot. Human sin could not exist in 
the face of the holy will of God if there were 
not a will, a human will, in it. One may an- 
alyse further, as Leibnitz did, and say that 
since will is the cause of existence, only a will 
can give evil an existence; it cannot be God's 
will which does this ; therefore it must be man's 
will. All this however is but analysis of the 
simple and evident fact, with which conscious- 
ness agrees, that defiant sin is but the free 
human will defying God. 

In this free human will we have the explana- 
tion of the otherwise inconceivable fact that 
sin exists in the world in spite of God. In 
place of God and strange defiant sin, we have 
God and defiant sinning souls. Sin reveals 
itself in more personal form set over against 
God. God must be good, and sin, in the soul, 



FACING THE PROBLEM 57 

is evil. God must be full of power, and sin 
defies Him. The problem gathers itself into 
the famous dilemma which troubled Lactan- 
tius and other ancient philosophers, and gave 
such joy to Voltaire, Bayle, and Hume: "Is 
sin by God's consent? Then it denies His 
goodness. Is it in spite of Him? Then it 
denies His power." It is a natural dilemma, 
and though we may not assent to its too easy 
conclusion, we cannot get away from its alter- 
nate question. Sin must be either " by God's 
consent," or " in spite of Him." Whichever 
view we take, we must reconcile it with both 
His goodness and His power, which are the 
two things which sin seems to deny, and the two 
things to be shown in face of sin in a true 
theodicy. For the question of the justice of 
God, reflected in the word theodicy, is absorbed 
in the question of His goodness, which sums 
up His whole moral character. The question 
of His wisdom also disappears in the question 
of His goodness and power, for Divine good- 
ness must be wise goodness, and Divine power 
wise power. Everything else which may be 



58 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

asked of God's character, nature or existence, 
in view of sin, is resolved into the question 
either of His goodness or of His power. The 
problem of theodicy is then clear before us. 
God must be good, but sin in His world is evil. 
God must be full of power, but sinners defy 
Him. 

It is true that we cannot stake our belief 
in God upon the solution of the dilemma, for 
God is as real as the sin which is the basis of 
the question. But whichever side of the 
dilemma we take, it is necessary to vindicate 
both Divine goodness and Divine omnipotence 
at once, and not, as is sometimes done, to de- 
fend Divine goodness by holding that sin is 
in spite of God, and then to defend Divine 
omnipotence by showing that after all sin is 
by His consent. If we shift in this way, the 
dilemma will fell us, as it has felled others. 
If we say, for instance, that sin is in spite of 
God, we must show that it not only does not 
deny His goodness, but does not deny His 
power. This is really the side of the dilemma 
which, for every reason, we have from the 



FACING THE PROBLEM 59 

beginning chosen. For instinct tells us natu- 
rally that sin is in spite of God. In that lies 
largely its heinousness and its moral quality. 
We could add to this general instinct also the 
witness of our conscience, which, if it tells us 
anything of a superior moral Power, tells us 
that that Power is wholly against our sins. 
The very problem of sin is that sin seems to 
be set against all that we must believe of God's 
character and nature. It is natural then, un- 
less the contrary is proved, to assume that sin 
is in spite of God. And holding steadily that 
sin is in spite of God, we must, in order to 
reach a real theodicy, find that sin is no denial 
either of His goodness or of His power. If 
that can be found, the theodicy is found. 



IV 

THE PROBLEM OF GOD'S GOODNESS 

ONE thing is clear in regard to the good- 
ness of God, and needs no argument. 
If sin is in spite of God, the fact that 
He does not prevent it is clearly no denial of 
His goodness in His government of the world. 
The question of His goodness is then rather a 
question of His creation of the soul which can 
sin in spite of Him. For if sin is in spite of 
Him, His true moral responsibility is that He 
reates the soul whose sin He cannot prevent. 
It is inconceivable, certainly, that He creates 
it a sinful soul, or creates it with the seeds of 
sin in it. That would be, not a problem, but 
a flat denial of God. But the problem which 
sin raises in regard to God's goodness is that 
He creates the soul which can sin, and can sin 
in spite of Him. 

We cannot evade this problem of God's 

60 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S GOODNESS 61 

goodness in the creation of the soul by deny- 
ing that the soul is His creation. For crea- 
tion of the soul is the only theory of the origin 
of the soul which is possible if we admit the 
existence of God. Evolution, which seems to 
many a theory of the origin of the soul, is, 
except in its atheistic or agnostic form, a 
theory simply of the mode of creation. In 
fact, any other hypothesis than creation of 
the soul directly denies God's existence. If 
we declare that the soul is not His creation, 
we have a dualism in the universe. We have 
beings self-existent like Himself and defying 
Him, or else created by some other defiant 
self-existent being, — in either case an abso- 
lute denial of His omnipotence and hence of 
His existence. Neither can we escape the 
problem of the free soul as His creation by 
affirming, as is so often done at the present 
day, that the soul is not so directly a creation 
of God that its defiance really defies Him, 
because its will is really a part of His will 
and even in its sin against God is uninten- 
tionally carrying out His vaster will. For 



62 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

this hypothesis, which if it did not claim to 
maintain the reality of sin would be pan- 
theism, denies God, and, though it cannot de- 
stroy God, destroys itself; since if sinful crea- 
tures are really, and not rhetorically, a part 
of whatever God exists, then a sinless and 
holy God, the only God in whom we can be- 
lieve, does not exist ; and if He does not exist, 
human souls and wills cannot be in any way a 
part of Him. There is no escape, then, from 
the problem of the free soul as God's creation 
by denying that it is His creation. If sin ex- 
ists and God exists, the soul which can sin, 
and whose sin He cannot prevent, must be 
His creation. This is the problem of sin and 
the goodness of God. 

In facing the problem of God's goodness 
and His creation of the soul which can sin, 
the first thing to be done is to see just in what 
way sin is contrary to His goodness. This is 
easily seen. 

Divine goodness seems to be challenged by 
sin in two different ways. Sin is a mystery in 
the universe of a good God first of all because 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S GOODNESS 63 

it is evil, and defies His moral nature, His 
righteousness, or, we might best say, His holi- 
ness. And sin is also a mystery because it brings 
ruin and misery upon human beings, and so 
strikes at His love for men. Divine moral 
goodness, or holiness, and Divine love are the 
two aspects of Divine goodness which are 
concerned in sin, and of which we must ask 
the question concerning the defiant sinning 
soul as a Divine creation. 

Is the creation of a moral being, with power 
of choice between good and evil, and conse- 
quent ability to sin, inconsistent with Divine 
holiness? The answer is contained in that 
very phrase, " a moral being." A moral be- 
ing is one who, having the power of choice, 
is capable of moral goodness, or holiness. For 
holiness is more than mere sinlessness. The 
ox is sinless, but he is not holy. His being is 
a moral vacuum, as empty of moral good as 
it is of moral evil. Holiness is moral choice 
of good, that is, deliberate or instinctive, and 
habitual, choice of good by the free will, where 
evil might have been chosen. Where there is 



64 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

no power to choose evil, the choice of good 
means nothing, and is not really a choice. If 
God then would create a being capable of holi- 
ness, he must create a moral being, capable of 
choice. Such a being may have, and indeed, 
if it comes from a holy Creator, must have, 
a created tendency toward holiness, but it 
must also have, to make holiness possible, the 
power of choice, and hence the possibility of 
sin. It cannot be questioned, then, that the 
creation of a moral being, the only kind of 
being who is capable of holiness, even though 
capable also of sin, is consistent with Divine 
holiness. 

And beyond this truth, universally recog- 
nised, especially since Jonathan Edwards, we 
may go so far as to say, for ourselves, that in 
the highest sense the creation of a moral being 
is the only creation which really involves 
Creative holiness at all. For though the 
Creator's benevolence may be active in the 
creation of every living thing, and though 
there may be a holy purpose in the creation 
of the inanimate world, in so far as that world 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S GOODNESS 65 

is to influence moral beings, in the deepest 
sense the only distinctively holy creation is 
one in which holiness is the ultimate purpose, 
as it is in the creation of a moral being. And 
we can see also that the creation of a moral 
being is the only creation in which God could 
take what we may call a receptively holy inter- 
est, as distinguished from His holy purpose for 
the creation itself. For the love and worship 
of one moral being, who is free not to worship 
and love, is worth more to Him than all the 
inanimate or instinctive adoration of the uni- 
verse. 

It is beyond any question, then, that the 
creation of a moral being, who is able to sin in 
spite of God, but is above all able to be holy, 
is consistent with Divine holiness, and is even 
the only creation which could really reveal 
Divine holiness to us. And when we have 
seen this we have seen the truth in regard to 
Divine love and the creation of a moral being. 
The creation of beings who have the Divine 
prerogative of choice and the divine moral na- 
ture is certainly consistent with Divine love. 



66 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

It is a far more loving creation than that of 
beings who have not this part of the Divine 
nature imparted to them. And it is surely a 
work of Divine love, to give us the power to 
be holy by giving us the power of choice; it 
is far more a work of love than, by cutting off 
the alternative possibility of sinning, to cut 
off all possibility of holiness and likeness to 
God both now and in a future life. 

And we may go again beyond this widely 
recognised truth and say that while every 
creative act may be benevolent, the creation of 
a moral being is the only one which in the 
deepest sense involves Divine love. For a 
Divine loving Being, who delights in love, 
must find the true delight which He has in 
His creatures in the love of moral beings, who 
are free not to love and whose love means 
loving choice of Him. And in the same way 
Divine love can bless and make blest in the 
truest sense only those of its created beings 
who can love as God loves, not by mere in- 
stinct, but with the soul, and who therefore 
know what love is. 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S GOODNESS 67 

It is beyond question, then, that the creation 
of moral beings, which is consistent with 
Divine holiness, is consistent with Divine love, 
and seems in the highest sense the only kind 
of creation which could reveal Divine holiness 
and love. We are safe in affirming that the 
creation of a free soul, which, though it must 
have the power to sin, has the power and the 
tendency to be holy, and to love God, and to 
be blest by His holiness and love, is in every 
way consistent with Divine goodness, and is 
the highest creative revelation of that good- 
ness. The defiant soul cannot be called a 
problem of Creative goodness. It is rather a 
witness to Creative goodness. 

But, it may be asked, is the creation of a 
soul with power of choice a work of Divine 
holiness and love if the Creator foresees that 
soul sinning instead of becoming holy? Is 
the gift of moral freedom after all a good 
gift, when the Giver sees it used by the soul 
to efface its Maker's image and to destroy His 
purpose in its creation? The only answer to 
this question is the Redemption. So far we 



68 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

have been in the region of natural religion, 
though of natural religion latent in human 
consciousness and reason until evoked by re- 
vealed truth. But we are brought here to the 
central truth of revealed religion, the Re- 
demption, as the only answer to the final ques- 
tion of sin and Divine goodness. We are 
seeking, not to establish Christian truth, but 
to find a rational and logical solution of this 
problem of theodicy, one consistent with the 
facts of the problem, that is, with the good- 
ness and power of God and the sinfulness of 
sin; and our search upon the grounds of rea- 
son has brought us to the point where the 
Redemption is the only rational answer to the 
question of Divine goodness. If we reject 
the Redemption, not because it logically fails 
to answer the question, but because of other 
feelings or considerations outside of our prob- 
lem, our search for a solution falls to the 
ground. But if we desire an answer, con- 
sistent with the nature of God and the nature 
of sin, to this further question of Divine good- 
ness in creating a free soul, which, instead of 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S GOODNESS 69 

being holy, will actually sin, the Redemption 
is the rational and consistent answer. 

By the Redemption is meant God's saving 
the soul from the sin into which it has fallen 
and His giving to the soul eternal life, through 
the incarnation, death and resurrection of His 
Son Jesus Christ This, which is not in any 
way out of harmony with God's nature or with 
the condition of sin in the soul, provides an 
answer to the question of Divine goodness in 
creating the soul with power of choice. For 
if God, foreseeing sin, foresees also a redemp- 
tion of the soul from sin and a final attainment 
of holiness, there can be no question of the 
reality of His good purpose in creating the 
soul for holiness. We certainly might ques- 
tion the reality of a holy and loving purpose 
in the creation of the soul if no soul was ever 
to attain holiness. But if the Creator fore- 
sees human holiness attained at last through 
the Redemption, His goodness is unquestioned 
in creating a race of moral beings, the only 
kind of beings capable at all of holiness. The 
Redemption then gives complete reality to the 



70 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

goodness of the Divine purpose in creating 
the soul which now sins. 

And beyond this it is also clear that Di- 
vine goodness in the creation of the soul shows 
itself, in view of the Redemption, more glori- 
ous than if sin were not foreseen. For while 
the Creator only foresees sin, He not only 
foresees, but makes, Redemption at His own 
great cost. And certainly the holiness of God 
could not be shown so wonderfully in any 
other way as in His putting even Himself, per- 
fect as He is, under punishment, suffering and 
death, that holiness might have its way in the 
universe. Certainly also Divine love could 
not show itself so greatly in any other way as 
in the gift of Itself for men. Above and be- 
yond the divine gift of moral freedom, beyond 
an infinitude of blessings, beyond every other 
gift of love, one thing yet remains, — God 
Himself. Giving Himself in the Redemption, 
He gives the one perfect and infinite gift of 
love. If God in creating the soul foresees 
His purpose of holiness prevented by sin and 
attained only through the Redemption, we see 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S GOODNESS 71 

His creation of the soul an infinitely holy and 
loving thing. For we see the creation of the 
soul a good creation when measured merely 
by the holy human life which is the ultimate 
purpose of the creation, but we see it infinitely 
good when it is measured by the Divine life 
which He sacrifices in the Redemption to carry 
out that purpose. In the light of the Redemp- 
tion, the creation, for holiness, of the soul 
whose sin is foreseen, appears not only good, 
but infinitely good. 

We have found then in the good purpose 
of the creation of the soul, enhanced and glori- 
fied as that purpose is by the foreseen neces- 
sity of the Redemption, the rational and con- 
sistent solution of the problem of God's good- 
ness and His creation of the soul which can 
sin in spite of Him. For the gift of moral 
freedom thus reveals itself as not an objection 
but a witness to the goodness of Him who 
made the soul. It was already clear that, if 
God truly cannot prevent sin, its existence is 
no denial of His goodness in His government 
of the world. And there is now clearly no 



72 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

denial of His goodness in the fact that He 
creates the soul which can sin in spite of Him. 
It is a positive and, in view of the Redemption, 
a measureless witness to His goodness, that 
He creates the soul which can be holy and 
which can sin. Sin is therefore no denial of 
the goodness of God, 



V 

THE PROBLEM OF GOD'S POWER 

THE problem of the soul which sins in 
spite of God lies now in the fact that 
its sin is " in spite of God." It is now 
a problem not of Divine goodness, but of Di- 
vine power. And in meeting this question of 
Divine power we must be sure that we do not 
make it a question again of God's goodness 
by turning to the other position of the di- 
lemma, that sin is by God's permission. We 
must show if we can that, while still in spite 
of Him, sin is no denial of His power. Neither 
can we do this by stating the unquestionable 
fact of God's omnipotence as an end of the 
discussion, for we must solve the question not 
by optimism, but by rational explanation of the 
facts of the problem itself as they have pre- 
sented themselves to us. 

With the question of God's goodness was 
a question of His creation of the soul, the 

73 



74 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

question of His power is a question of His 
government of the world. And the ground 
upon which the defiance of God by the sinning 
soul seems to be a denial of God's power is of 
course the fact that God's power must be 
omnipotence. It must be infinite, limitless; 
and the sinning soul by its defiance seems to 
set a limit to it in His government of the 
world. It is again the dilemma upon one 
side or the other of which all the real theories 
of theodicy range themselves. " Is sin by 
God's consent, and does He limit His own 
exercise of power in order to permit sin? 
Then His goodness cannot be infinite." And 
certainly those theories which hold that sin is 
by God's consent must try to show that such 
consent does not deny God's perfect goodness. 
" Or is sin in spite of God? " For every rea- 
son of human consciousness and of God's na- 
ture, we have held that sin is in spite of God. 
" Then," says the dilemma, " the sinning soul 
limits His power, and His power cannot be 
infinite." Holding then that sin is in spite of 
God, we find sin a problem not of Divine 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S POWER 75 

goodness, but of Divine power in the world. 
But though it is incredible to the human 
heart that sin should be by God's permission, 
and almost as strange that anyone should place 
Divine goodness in doubt rather than Divine 
omnipotence, we have the strange fact that 
nearly all the best known theories of theodicy 
meet this question of God's power in His 
world by declaring that sin is by Divine per- 
mission. In this way they dispose of the de- 
nial of His power, but they must take up, and 
do take up, the superhuman task of recon- 
ciling this permission with Divine goodness. 
We have therefore these theories of "permis- 
sion of sin," which we must briefly consider, 
since they are among the leading theories of 
theodicy. 

How can "permission of sin" be harmon- 
ized with the goodness of God? No one, in- 
deed, among saner thinkers, has said that God 
actually approves of sin, for that is a thing 
inconceivable upon any true view of the reality 
of God and sin. But the basis of these theories 
is the idea that while sin itself is hateful to 



76 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

God, He permits it for the sake of other and 
higher things. Or, if we would have this idea 
in its most definite form, it is that God per- 
mits sin, evil in itself, as a means of greater 
good than could have been brought to pass 
without it. This idea appears first in the 
Theodicee of Leibnitz, where he has drawn out 
with much eloquence the thesis that sin is per- 
mitted by Divine goodness because it makes 
possible the " best possible world." Evil, he 
says, is thus a means of good, for the world 
needs both good and evil. Light needs 
shadow, and heat needs cold, in order to make 
possible by contrast an enhanced and vivid ex- 
istence of light and heat, and so good needs 
evil, for there cannot really be good without 
its opposite. It is somewhat of a surprise, 
then, to find Leibnitz, on his descent to sober 
argument, explaining that he means that sin 
is a necessity, or at least that the possibility of 
sin is a necessity, in a world of moral agents, 
which is the best kind of a world. Sin is, 
according to Leibnitz, a necessary means of 
good only to this extent, that the possibility of 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S POWER 77 

sin, being inherent in moral freedom, is un- 
avoidable in a moral world. For this ex- 
istence of a moral world requires the existence 
of moral beings, who by their Divinely-given 
nature are able to sin in spite of God. And 
from this Leibnitz argues that though sin is in 
spite of God, there is no denial of God's power 
in the fact that He cannot coerce the soul, 
since the limitation of His power lies in this 
uncoercible nature of free will. It is evident 
upon a very slight analysis, then, that Leib- 
nitz regards sin as being in spite of God, and 
that his theodicy, though it may appear so at 
first sight, is not one of Divine permission of 
sin. 

It is in Puritan New England, in the school, 
if we may call it so, of Jonathan Edwards 
that the theory of sin as the necessary means 
of the greatest good first arises in any serious- 
ness. The extreme Calvinism of Hopkins 
and Bellamy, in which they ran not only be- 
yond Calvin, but beyond Edwards, beheld all 
things, even sin itself, as planned and carried 
out by the sovereign Will of God for a su- 



78 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

preme purpose, which was the greatest or 
highest good. And if sin is thus willed by the 
Will of God, it must be because sin is a neces- 
sary means of the highest good. Even in a 
time when thinkers followed logic to conclu- 
sions, as we seldom do now, and among those 
who carried their doctrine of Divine Sover- 
eignty to the point of complete fatalism, very 
few were drawn by this doctrine of a direct 
Divine purpose in sin. But the idea found 
wider favour in the modified theory that 
though man's will, and not God's, is the source 
of sin, God permits man to sin because sin is 
the necessary means of the greatest good. 
Yet even in this modified form the idea can- 
not commend itself to a rational or reverent 
mind. It is too much of a Divine doing of 
evil that good may come, or an apotheosis of 
the Jesuitical creed that the end justifies the 
means. The idea, even with a glamour of logic 
about it, is of itself inconceivable. And there 
is good reason for our instinctive antipathy 
to that idea, for even in this form of mere 
" permission of sin as a necessary means of 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S POWER 79 

the greatest good " there lurks the danger 
which lay in the view of a direct Divine pur- 
pose in sin. The danger, the fatal defect, is 
this, that if sin is the necessary means of the 
greatest good, then God, in planning the 
greatest good, must make sin a certainty, either 
by implanting sin in the souls whom He cre- 
ates, or by leading them inevitably into sin, in 
order to make the greatest good inevitable. 
And on the other hand there is no justification 
for suggesting a Divine permission of sin as a 
means to the Divine end unless it is the neces- 
sary means. This view, therefore, of Divine 
permission of sin as the necessary means of 
the greatest good throws the responsibility for 
sin, and in a very real sense the authorship of 
sin, upon God. There is nothing in the idea 
to bring us to belief in permission of sin. 

Nevertheless when we come to see what the 
thought of the present day can do with the 
dilemma, we find this same idea in a new and 
philosophical dress, as a part, and a vital part, 
of the theory called evolution. Strictly speak- 
ing, the theory of evolution has no use for Di- 



80 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

vine permission of sin. The science of Dar- 
win and the philosophy of Spencer neither as- 
sumed nor desired to explain the universe 
from a theistic point of view. But that kind 
of evolutionary theory which has abandoned 
Darwin and Spencer, and has become theistic 
and even religious, does claim to be a philos- 
ophy of the work of God in His universe, or 
at least in His world. And as a theory of the 
world it meets at once the great question of 
the existence of sin in the world. But here, 
at the one and supreme problem which as a 
world-theory it has to solve, it must be said 
that the evolutionary theory fails. For it of- 
fers as its only real solution of the problem the 
old idea of sin as the means of the greatest 
good. 

For according to this theory of evolution 
the world is now in the midst of a vast un- 
folding and upward-growing process, the 
motive power of which is the infinite Will of 
God, and the goal of which is the perfection of 
the race, or the highest good of the world, or 
some far-off divine event. It is in many ways 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S POWER 81 

an inspiring conception of the Divine plan of 
the world. But in any plan of the world the 
great fact which most needs explanation is the 
fact of sin. And the presence of sin cannot 
be explained merely by the supposition, or by 
the proof, if we could prove it, that the race 
is being brought by a Divine process out of sin 
into a perfect life, for the presence of sin at 
the present time in this process is what requires 
solution. 

The same thing applies to all theodicies 
which have universal salvation or restoration 
of souls for their basis, as, for instance, the 
eloquent Theodicy of George A. Gordon 
(" Immortality and the New Theodicy "). To 
say, even if it could be said with truth, that all 
souls may be saved from sin, does not touch 
the problem of theodicy. 

If we ask for an explanation of the presence 
of sin in the world during this process, we 
shall get it somewhat in this wise: that sin 
unavoidably arises from the material nature 
out of which the race is growing. For God's 
method of creating the perfect race, the theory 



82 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

runs, is by evolving it, or causing it to evolve, 
out of a material, earthy nature, up into the 
life of the spirit. And during the process this 
material nature, this clinging earthiness, neces- 
sarily and inevitably hinders the soul in its 
progress and causes it to sin. Sin, therefore, 
which arises from the necessities of this mate- 
rial beginning or investiture of the race, is a 
necessary part of the evolution of the race, and 
since it is unavoidable, its existence is not in 
any way to be made a charge against God's 
goodness. But, we may ask, is the existence 
of sin in this process actually in spite of God? 
Is it a radical defect and break in the process, 
by which sin has gotten the better of the 
Divine Will? For if that is so, there is very 
little left of the evolutionary plan and its cer- 
tain outcome. But the evolutionist would ex- 
plain to us that, though the soul sins directly 
against God, nevertheless God's Will over- 
rules and includes in its vast process and pur- 
pose all these defiant human wills, and is using 
even their sin, which they think is wholly in 
spite of Him, as a part of His evolution of the 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S POWER 83 

race. God refrains from crushing out sin, 
because it is a necessary element in His 
method of evolving a perfect race from ani- 
malism. There are some evolutionists, repre- 
sented very well by John Fiske, who declare 
that sin is not only a necessary element in the 
Divine method of evolving the race from 
earthiness, but that sin is actually the essential 
thing in the process. John Fiske, for instance, 
represents sin as necessary to spiritual growth, 
and as one of the Divine agencies in the up- 
lifting of the race. He quotes Leibnitz, to 
the effect that there can be no morality with- 
out the possibility of sin, and going himself 
beyond this sees no morality possible without 
actual sin. He, and those whom he repre- 
sents, look upon sin as a spur or stimulus to 
the soul, as a contrast which makes the good 
more desired by the soul, and as an occasion 
for moral and spiritual choice. At this point 
sin becomes so wholly a means of good that 
it really ceases to be evil. The evolutionist 
passes into practical denial of the reality of 
sin, and beholds " every fall as a fall upward/' 



84 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

and sees the progress of the race beginning 
with Adam's sin. This denial of the reality 
of sin is the natural outcome of the evolu- 
tionary view of sin as a means of the highest 
good. Every paradox tends to dissolve into 
unreality, and the paradox of sin as a means 
of good is no exception. For sin, as a means 
of good, becomes good in itself, not only in the 
rhapsodic logic of Emerson or the genial as- 
sumptions of John Fiske, but in the thought 
of every evolutionist who follows his own 
theory to its end. 

Perhaps it is hardly fair to let the logical 
conclusion of evolution in regard to sin crowd 
out the witness of the moderate evolutionist, 
who is a follower of revealed religion as well 
as of evolution, and who does not go with 
evolution to its panegyric on sin as a positive 
good. His view of the case is that God is 
limiting His exercise of power in order to let 
the soul sin, simply because sin, though it is 
not pleasing to Him, is a necessity in the evolu- 
tion of the perfect race from animalism. This 
is a theory deserving the name of a theodicy, 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S POWER 85 

and is the only theory of theodicy which evolu- 
tionary thought can honestly propose. For 
the hypothesis that sin is really a good is not 
a solution but an evasion of the problem. And 
the hypothesis that sin, being evil, is in the 
evolutionary process entirely in spite of God 
is not a theory of theodicy, for it merely states 
the problem. Moreover, this opinion, that sin 
is wholly in spite of God, while it is a safe and 
sane attitude in general, is a fatal attitude for 
the evolutionist. The believer in a fallen race 
and in a world not going wholly according 
to God's plan may hold that sin is in spite of 
God, but the evolutionist, who sees the present 
order of things as a carrying out of God's 
great plan, cannot hold that so great a part of 
this order as sin is can be in spite of God. 
The only theodicy which the evolutionary 
philosophy can offer is this of the modern 
school, that God permits sin because sin is a 
necessity in the evolution of a perfect race 
from earthiness. This is not a new theodicy, 
it is true, for it is but the old idea, newly-drest, 
of Hopkins and Bellamy, that sin is permitted 



86 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

as the necessary means of the greatest good. 
We have but to put the perfecting of the race 
or the far-off divine event in place of the 
greatest good. Nor should it be really sur- 
prising that the evolutionist, who thinks of 
Calvin a little as Calvin thought of the devil, 
should have come to the extreme conclusion 
of Calvinism, far beyond Calvin's own logic. 
For hyper-Calvinism and Evolution are much 
at one. Both behold the world under the spell 
of one great idea. The all-embracing, over- 
riding Will of God, the great Idea of Evolu- 
tion, is but the Divine Sovereignty which was 
the sole idea of extreme Calvinism. And the 
survival of the fittest, with its destruction of 
the unfit, is but Election writ in terms me- 
chanical and merciless. As for this mutual 
idea of Divine permission of sin as the neces- 
sary means of the greatest good, it is open to 
the same fatal objection as in its Calvinistic 
days. If sin is not the necessary means, there 
is no excuse for imagining its use as the 
means; and if it is the necessary means, it 
makes God necessarily the planner and author 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S POWER 87 

of sin. And while the older theory failed be- 
cause by implication it made sin inevitable, 
the evolutionary theory openly shows God as 
making sin inevitable by putting the soul in an 
environment in which, according to the evolu- 
tionary view, it not only can sin, but must sin. 
The evolutionary theory of God's work in the 
world, when it meets the one great problem 
which such a theory has to solve, needs only 
to declare itself in order to be discredited. It 
has certainly done nothing to lead us to that 
naturally inconceivable view that sin is by 
God's consent. 

But there is a much simpler theory of per- 
mission of sin than these which we have just 
discussed, and it is one held more or less for- 
mally by many who think upon this problem. 
This theory is that God, who has created the 
free soul for a holy purpose, limits His own 
exercise of power in order to let the free soul 
sin. For He could not directly prevent the 
soul's sinning without destroying its moral 
freedom, with its possibility and purpose of 
holiness. God's holy and loving purpose in 



88 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

creating a moral being like the soul is held in 
this theory to justify and explain Divine per- 
mission of sin. This idea is certainly founded 
on primary facts, not on disputable theories 
of the universe, and it reduces the hypothesis 
of permission of sin to its simplest terms. Nor 
does it make sin inevitable, as do the theories 
of sin as the necessary means of greatest good. 
But it has still the superhuman task of making 
credible the inconceivable idea that the holy 
God should directly permit sin, and to this 
task it brings nothing of very great force. Its 
facts have weight enough, but no momentum 
in this direction. The final holiness of the soul 
made sure by the Redemption may be sufficient 
reason for the creation of the soul by a good 
God, but it is certainly not reason enough for 
a Divine permission of sin. It is not at all to 
the point to prove, as Julius Miiller does in his 
great work on "The Christian Doctrine of 
Sin," that in the abstract it is loving in Divine 
power to limit itself when there is occasion, 
since such limitation is akin to self-sacrifice, 
or as De Pressense does, that " Divine liberty 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S POWER 89 

can certainly put limits on itself, can even 
assert itself by voluntarily accepting the limita- 
tion imposed by the created liberty of which 
it is itself the source." The question is not 
whether God can limit Himself, nor whether 
He can prove His own liberty by doing so, but 
whether He can limit Himself to allow sin, 
and whether His own liberty will let Him al- 
low sin. And if Self-limitation to allow sin 
were a sacrifice, what would it sacrifice? As 
a self-sacrifice it would sacrifice Divine holi- 
ness, which is inconceivable, and secondly it 
would sacrifice, not self, but the souls whom 
it permitted to sin, which is not self-sacrifice 
at all. The holy and loving purpose of God 
in creating the soul makes it more inconceiv- 
able than ever, in fact, that He should permit 
sin to ruin the soul and affront Him in it. If 
His purpose in the soul were merely negative, 
it might have no bearing upon the question 
of permission of sin. But if His purpose for 
the soul is one of holiness and love, that atti- 
tude toward the soul renders Divine permis- 
sion of unholiness and ruin in the soul more 



90 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

inconceivable than ever, unless sin is the 
necessary means of the final holiness of the 
soul; and that, we have seen, is incredible, be- 
cause it would make God necessarily the 
author of sin. We may as well admit, there- 
fore, that Divine self-limitation to permit sin 
is inconceivable. The sooner we do so, also, 
and admit that sin is wholly in spite of God, 
the sooner we shall make theology credible to 
the popular mind, which troubles itself but 
little about any question of God's power, but 
very greatly about any question of His good- 
ness, and has long found in the idea that God 
permits sin the great stumbling-block of the- 
ology. For there is nothing which can make 
conceivable a direct withholding of Divine 
power for the sake of sin. The Redemption 
makes the creation of a free soul, which can 
sin and will sin, a holy and loving act, but even 
the Redemption could not make Divine self- 
limitation to let the soul sin a holy and loving 
act. 

It is often represented, however, that, al- 
though we cannot say that the Redemption 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S POWER 91 

could make permission of sin a holy and loving 
act, nevertheless it does give us an explanation 
of Divine permission of sin. For the Re- 
demption, which would not have taken place 
if there were no sin, is in its glory of love the 
supreme good in the universe. It is not prob- 
able, indeed, that anybody conceives that God 
causes sin in order to make the Redemption 
possible, but it seems to many thinkers that 
the wondrous character of the Atonement 
which is occasioned by sin overcomes the in- 
conceivability of God's permitting sin. For 
theological thinkers, of older and newer 
schools alike, perceive that sin gave occasion 
for the supreme display of Divine love in the 
incarnation, sufferings and death of Jesus 
Christ. And those who hold to moderate 
Calvinism, who are doubtless in the great 
majority, would add that not only was Divine 
love revealed in the Atonement as in no other 
way, but that holiness and justice were re- 
vealed as in no other way, and that mercy and 
compassion, and self-sacrifice, would not have 
been revealed at all without it. And because 



92 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

of this a large number, and among them some 
of the noblest and most reverent thinkers, are 
inclined to hold that the Atonement in its glory 
of love and holiness must make permission of 
the sin which occasions the Atonement con- 
ceivable in a holy and loving God. 

This is by far the best of all theories of per- 
mission of sin, for certainly if anything could 
outweigh the inconceivability of Divine per- 
mission of sin, the Divine Atonement could. 
And this theory has to the believer in revealed 
religion the great thing in its favour that it is 
Scriptural. But while the Atonement or Re- 
demption is Scriptural, the idea of its making 
possible the permission of sin is a deduction 
from the Scripture facts. For the most which 
we can draw from the Scriptures in this con- 
nection is that because He has a Redemption 
for them God does not destroy at once the 
whole sinful race of men and so blot sin from 
the cleansed universe. But to say that God 
refrains from destroying sinners is not the 
same as saying that He limits Himself to let 
them become sinners. God may bear patiently 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S POWER 93 

with sinners in order to save them, but shall 
He also let them become sinners in order to 
save them? And do the glory and the love 
revealed in saving them make it credible that 
He should directly permit them to sin ? Does 
the Redemption make Divine permission of 
sin conceivable? Now, when we stop to con- 
sider the relation of the Redemption to sin, we 
see that it is very far from making such a thing 
conceivable. For the Redemption shows sin 
as worse than we should ever have known it 
to be. For it is because sin is evil, and strikes 
at God's holiness, and ruins those whom He 
loves, that it calls for the Redemption. In the 
Redemption, then, we see for the first time 
some real measure, the only wholly Divine meas- 
ure, of the greatness of sin. The unholiness 
of sin is supremely revealed in God's sacrifice 
of His very self to satisfy the needs of holiness 
because of sin. And the harmfulness of sin 
to those whom He loves is supremely revealed 
in His giving Himself to save them from its 
results. The Atonement, therefore, makes it 
more than ever inconceivable that the holy and 



94 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

loving God should directly permit so immeas- 
urable an evil. For the Atonement not only 
reveals the whole evil of sin, but it shows God 
as set with His whole nature and character, 
yes, and with His life, and His very death, 
against sin. If Divine permission of sin is 
inconceivable already, we can find it only more 
inconceivable, if that were possible, in the light 
of the Atonement. If it be true that human 
suffering because of sin is God's protest 
against sin, — and there is every reason to be- 
lieve it true — certainly His own suffering be- 
cause of sin, and for the destruction of sin, 
is God's infinite protest against sin. 

These arguments for Divine permission of 
sin have been from the beginning doomed to 
failure. For they propose something incon- 
ceivable to human minds, which on the one 
side feel unalterably that a perfectly good 
Ruler cannot withhold His own power in 
order to permit sin, and on the other feel too 
strongly the witness of their own conscience 
that their sin is really, and not apparently, 
against God. It must be a very great Weight 



PROBLEM OF GOD'S POWER 95 

of argument which could reverse this feeling-. 
But far from reversing it, these arguments 
have all alike ended by making the idea of 
Divine permission of sin more inconceivable 
than before. And the reason is that all facts 
tell against such a primary impossibility, and 
the largest facts, therefore, such as God's de- 
sire for the greatest good, or His plan for a 
perfect race, or His holy creative purpose in 
the soul, or the Atonement, which these 
theories have laid hold of, tell most largely 
against the inconceivable idea. Sin as the 
" necessary means of the greatest good " 
would involve God as the author of sin. Evo- 
lution would directly reveal God as the author 
of sin. God's holy creative purpose in the 
soul makes voluntary permission of unholi- 
ness in the soul more inconceivable than ever. 
The Atonement, God's infinite protest against 
sin, renders " Divine permission of sin " most 
inconceivable of all. 

We must recognise, then, as beyond ques- 
tion the fact that sin is in spite of God. For 
these theories of permission of sin have only 



96 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

made permission of sin more incredible than 
ever. We must hold that the soul's defiance 
of God is as real as it seems to the soul. We 
must believe our consciousness, our conscience, 
and God's protest in natural evil, when they 
tell us that sin is in spite of God. These 
theories have led us no nearer to a theodicy, 
except as we have seen yet more clearly that 
sin is in spite of God, that He is unalterably 
set against it, and that, if it is in spite of God, 
its existence is no denial of His perfect good- 
ness in His government of the world. The 
real problem of His goodness is that He cre- 
ates the soul which can so sin in spite of Him. 
And in regard to this we have found that sin 
is no denial of His goodness in creating the 
soul, but is even a witness to His goodness in 
making the soul able to sin and consequently 
able to be holy. The problem is still, 
therefore, a problem of His power, which must 
be omnipotence, and which is defied by sin. 



VI 

THE POWER OF GOD, AND THE 
THEODICY 

THE question of defiant sin, therefore, 
is now a question not of God's good- 
ness, but of His power. If sin is in 
spite of God, does not the soul limit His power, 
and is His power then omnipotence? How 
shall we reconcile this defiance with His om- 
nipotence? We cannot do it at the expense 
of His goodness, by falling back upon the idea 
of some Divine permission or use of sin. 
Since, then, He cannot righteously restrain 
the exercise of His own power in order to 
permit the soul to sin, what does restrain His 
righteous power in this case? Does the soul 
do it? That is as inconceivable, we must ad- 
mit, as is Divine self-limitation to permit sin, 
for while that denies His goodness, this limita- 
tion by the soul denies His omnipotence. But 
if sin is in spite of Him and He does not re- 

97 



98 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

strain His own power, nor does the soul re- 
strain Him, what does restrain His power? 

We have, to help us at the beginning of this 
problem, a few theories, already partly familiar 
to us, which form the nearest approach which 
has been made to a true theory of theodicy. 
First in these attempts, as in nearly every line 
of thought upon this problem, stands the work 
of Leibnitz. For we come now at last to the 
true logic, often obscured, and often aban- 
doned by Leibnitz himself, of the Theodicee. 
It is, in brief, that God has not prevented evil 
because evil is unavoidable in the best pos- 
sible world. For the best possible world is 
one containing morality, or free moral agents, 
and in such a world sin is an unavoidable pos- 
sibility. But Leibnitz clearly does not mean, 
as he sometimes seems to mean, that God limits 
Himself in order to let moral agents exist and 
sin. For he explains that neither does God 
limit Himself to permit sin, nor does sin limit 
Him and deny His omnipotence, but that it is 
the uncoercible, uncontradictable nature of a 
moral being which prevents His using His 



POWER OF GOD AND THEODICY 99 

omnipotence against sin. And therefore, 
while sin is wholly in spite of God, it is not a 
limitation of omnipotence by sin, but Divine 
rational inability to contradict the soul's na- 
ture, which keeps Him from directly prevent- 
ing sin. 

And before we consider this theory, we may 
set beside it the suggestion of Dr. N. W. Tay- 
lor of New Haven, that God may have re- 
frained from directly preventing sin because, 
though He hates it, it cannot be prevented in 
the best moral system. This in itself is but a 
suggestion, refreshing in its undogmatic tone, 
and yet at the most only an affirmation of faith 
that this is the best moral system. But this 
suggestion was made a theory at Andover, to 
the same general purpose as the idea of Leib- 
nitz. In this constructive form the theory was 
that God has not prevented sin because He 
cannot in a moral system — that is, not only 
that He cannot in the best moral system, but 
that He cannot in any moral system. For a 
moral system is one containing free agents 
whose very nature is uncontradictable and 



100 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

uncoercible. It is not, therefore, Divine 
choice nor yet Divine impotence which keeps 
God from directly preventing sin, but only 
Divine inability to contradict the uncontradict- 
able. 

And beside these two theories may be set 
a third, which reduces them to the simplest 
terms. It is, that for God to coerce the soul 
in the action of its free nature would be a 
" contradiction/' and that even God cannot 
work a contradiction, " for a contradiction is 
not an object of power." 

Now it is true that God, who must be a 
rational Being, cannot contradict that which 
is rationally uncontradictable by Him. And 
it is true that He cannot work a true contra- 
diction, that is, a contradiction of Himself. 
Such a contradiction is clearly impossible to 
omnipotence. These theories of theodicy 
have gone beyond all others, therefore, in the 
fact that they have grasped the principle upon 
which the dilemma must be solved. If the 
impossibility of God's coercing the soul lies 
in God's own rational and consistent nature, 



M3WER OF GOD AND THEODICY 101 

which cannot contradict itself, the dilemma 
is solved. For it is no denial of His omni- 
potence that He cannot work a contradiction of 
Himself, and, as an impossibility, it is no 
denial of His goodness that He does not do it. 
The true theodicy, however, must not only 
recognise this principle as the only way to a 
solution of the dilemma, but it must also show 
just how Divine coercion of the soul would be 
a true " contradiction/' a contradiction of God 
by Himself. 

One thing is plainly true in the statement 
that for God to coerce the free soul in its action 
would be for Hint to work a contradiction, 
and that is that there would be a contradiction 
of the free soul's nature. This is also what 
the theories of Leibnitz and of a "moral 
system " declare, that the coercion of the soul 
would be a complete contradiction of its na- 
ture. And it is beyond question that the soul 
is in its very nature free and uncoercible. But 
whether this incoercibility of the soul belongs 
only to the soul's nature, or has power also 
over God's nature, is another question. The 



102 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

true answer to this will be the true theodicy. 
What is this uncontradictable nature of the 
free soul or of a moral system ? Is it such that 
the soul's nature is as strong as God, and there- 
fore uncontradictable by Him, and that it can 
of its own power defy and restrain His power? 
That would be no solution of the dilemma, 
for it would deny God's omnipotence; it can 
hardly, therefore, be what these theories mean. 
What then is their answer to the question: 
how is coercion of the free soul a contradiction 
of God by Himself? 

Their answer, implied or expressed, is that 
the freedom and incoercibility of the soul, be- 
ing the soul's very nature, belongs to the na- 
ture of things, and that God cannot contradict 
the laws of the nature of things, because they 
are grounded in His own rational nature. 
He cannot contradict these laws, then, either 
to make two and two equal more than four, or 
to make the sum of the angles of a triangle 
equal less than two right angles, or, it is said, 
to coerce a free soul's action. Now it may not 
be absolutely certain that numerical and geo- 



POWER OF GOD AND THEODICY 103 

metrical laws He in God's nature, that they are 
not created, and not within His power to 
change. But if they are, there is still the 
main question, whether the free nature of the 
soul belongs, as they do, to the nature of 
things. Holding, as doubtless we must, that 
these laws lie in God's nature and are im- 
mutable, there is the great and radical differ- 
ence between them and the sinning soul, that 
they are in harmony with God's power and 
nature, while the sinning soul is defiant of His 
power and nature. And granting that they lie 
in God's nature, and are not merely created, 
there is an absolute difference between them 
and the sinning soul, in the fact that the free- 
dom of the soul is a created thing. It is not 
at all, like mathematical axioms, a law of 
God, and hence of the nature of things, but is 
only a law of the soul, which is itself, to all 
but the pantheist, a creation, not a part of 
God's nature. The freedom of the soul be- 
longs then, not to the nature of God, but only 
to the nature of the soul. It cannot therefore 
be said on this ground that Divine coercion 



104 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

of the soul would be a contradiction of God's 
own nature by Himself. The true theodicy 
must lie beyond these and all other theories, 
and it is for us to find it. 

How then would there be a contradiction 
of God by Himself, if He were to coerce the 
soul and so prevent sin? What would it 
really mean, that He should contradict the 
uncontradictable nature of the soul, uncontra- 
dictable perhaps by all save omnipotence? 
Simply this, that the nature of the soul, as a 
free and uncontradictable nature, would be 
destroyed. Divine coercion and contradiction 
of the free soul would be Divine destruction 
of the free and uncontradictable soul. This, 
which is a truth long evident to all who believe 
in the free soul, is the root of the matter in 
regard to Divine prevention of sin. Yet in 
itself it is not an answer to the question of 
theodicy. For how would destruction of the 
soul's free nature be a contradiction of God 
by Himself? If one says that God, in His 
desire for " morality," or a " moral system," or 
in His love for "moral beings," must permit 



POWER OF GOD AND THEODICY 105 

sin because He cannot directly prevent it with- 
out destroying these, one simply returns to 
" permission of sin," with its denial of Divine 
goodness. Or if, to avoid the idea of volun- 
tary permission of sin, we say that the destruc- 
tion of the free soul would be a contradiction 
of God by Himself, because something in His 
nature absolutely requires the existence of free 
souls, or of a moral system, or of a world 
with morality in it, the difficulty is not 
overcome. For if this were true, it would 
indicate, not that God could not coerce the soul 
and destroy these things, but that He permits 
its sin in order to satisfy the demand of His 
nature for these things, and this is incredible. 
Moreover, we know of nothing at all to prove 
such a demand in His nature, and if we did, 
it would by no means prove, or even indicate, 
that this particular system or these particular 
souls which have sin in them are necessary to 
His nature. The self-contradiction of God, 
in this destroying of the soul, is yet to be 
found. Why cannot God at once destroy this 
free soul which is not a part of Him, 



106 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

but only a creation, and which cannot 
be coerced in its sin without being destroyed? 
We have seen that as Ruler of the world the 
rational and consistent thing for Him to do 
would be to prevent sin even by destroying 
the soul, and it is His not preventing sin which 
has led men to doubt Him as Ruler of the 
world. Can it be because He created the soul 
that He cannot rationally and consistently de- 
stroy it? There seems some reason in the 
idea. For His relation as Creator is His pri- 
mary relation to the soul, and as Creator of the 
soul He stands, not over against the defiant 
soul, as the soul causes Him to stand as Ruler 
of the world, but, as it were, back of the soul 
and its frefe nature. But the mere fact that 
God is Creator is not a solution of the prob- 
lem, and does not make it a self-contradiction 
for Him to destroy the soul. The fact that 
God has created a thing does not bind Him not 
to destroy it. It has been often said, indeed, 
that " God cannot both create and destroy." 
But the problem cannot be met, nor God's 
self-consistency involved, by the bare enuncia- 



POWER OF GOD AND THEODICY 107 

tion of the fact that He is the Creator. The 
self-consistency of God as Creator of the soul, 
if in some way His coercing and destroying the 
soul would contradict Him as Creator, would 
be a clear and plain solution of the problem; 
but we must go beyond the mere fact of His 
creating the soul, to find this solution. For it 
is an absurdity to say that merely because God 
creates a thing He cannot consistently destroy 
it. If it were true, He could never destroy any- 
thing. It would deny in Him not only omnip- 
otence, but any real power at all in His world. 
And it is plainly not true that as a general 
principle God cannot destroy what He has 
created. He can often do it, and it is neither 
self-contradictory nor irrational. Some things 
even fulfil the purpose of their creation by 
being destroyed, and some may be destroyed 
when they have fulfilled their purpose. The 
inconsistency and contradiction in this destroy- 
ing of the soul which He has created is there- 
fore yet to be found, and found in a hitherto 
untrodden path. 

The first thing which appears in that path 



108 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

is that God's coercing and destroying the free 
soul would be very different from His destroy- 
ing other things which He had created. 
Some things, we have said, fulfil their purpose 
by being destroyed, and some may be destroyed 
with their purpose already sufficiently ful- 
filled. But destroying the soul, far from ful- 
filling this purpose in creating the soul, or 
from leaving that purpose already fulfilled, 
would break off and contradict His purpose of 
holiness and love in creating the soul. It 
would be working at cross-purposes with Him- 
self. And this is impossible to a self-consistent 
Being. The question about the soul then is 
this: Can God, when He has created a thing 
with a great and distinct purpose, rationally 
and consistently destroy that creation with the 
purpose wholly unaccomplished? Can He, 
creating moral beings, as we know, with a 
great purpose, rationally and self-consistently 
destroy those beings with His purpose wholly 
unaccomplished in them? The soul may act 
at cross-purposes with Him, and this is its sin ; 
but can He so act at cross-purposes with Him- 



POWER OF GOD AND THEODICY 109 

self? The soul may by its sin be inconsistent 
with His purpose; but can He be inconsistent 
with His own purpose? The soul may try to 
contradict the purpose and working of His 
power in its creation, and herein lies the soul's 
sin; but can He do so Himself? Plainly He 
cannot. He cannot consistently or rationally 
make His own creative purpose meaningless 
and irrational. He cannot contradict Him- 
self, and join with the soul in its sinful re- 
volt against His work and purpose. It would 
be to sin against His own Divine nature, as 
the soul sins against Him. This is but ra- 
tional self-consistency. It is a very different 
thing from being unable, merely because He 
created the soul, to coerce and destroy the soul. 
It is inability to work at cross-purposes with 
Himself. Neither is it merely that having 
once given the soul a free nature He cannot 
do anything inconsistent with that nature 
which he has created. The freedom of the 
soul does not lie in His nature, with which 
alone He cannot be inconsistent, as His own 
unity of purpose and of working does. Nor 



110 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

is it a mere voluntary carrying out of His pur- 
pose because it is a good purpose. Whatever 
His purpose in creating free souls, though we 
see it a good as well as a great one, it is but 
rational self-consistency which must keep Him, 
by the law of His nature, from breaking and 
contradicting that purpose. It is true that the 
same self-consistency might require that He 
should carry out His holy purpose in spite of 
the soul's sinning, or else that He should not 
create at all, and in this is a profound reason 
of the Atonement. But apart from this, if 
He is the Creator, who has made the soul with 
a great purpose, He cannot in rational self- 
consistency coerce and destroy the free soul, to 
prevent sin. This is not voluntary self- 
restraint or self-limitation on the part of God 
to permit sin, even with a good purpose. 
Neither is it restraint or limitation by the soul 
or its nature. It is but the inability of omnipo- 
tence to contradict itself. It is but Divine self- 
consistency and self-unity. It passes through 
the dilemma. Sin is not by God's consent; 
He would prevent it if He could, and protests 



POWER OF GOD AND THEODICY 111 

against it in natural evil; and His goodness 
remains unquestioned. And yet sin, though it 
is in spite of Him and He is unalterably set 
against it in His creature the soul, is no denial 
of His omnipotence, for it is His Creative self- 
consistency, which He could not break ration- 
ally or without sin against His highest nature, 
which must restrain Him in the case of the 
sinning soul. Such self-consistency and self- 
unity is the very principle of the being of God. 
It is in the highest sense the " wholeness," or 
holiness, which is, not an attribute, like His 
love, His righteousness, or His power, but the 
very nature itself, of God. 

Since sin is in spite of God, there is no denial 
of His goodness in the fact that He does not 
prevent it. And it is no denial of His good- 
ness that He creates the soul whose sin He can- 
not prevent. For in the light of His holy and 
loving creative purpose, and of the Redemp- 
tion, the creation of a soul which can sin, and 
does sin, and whose sin He cannot prevent, is 
a witness to His goodness. And on the other 
hand we have seen that it is no denial of His 



112 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

power that He cannot prevent sin, for even 
omnipotence cannot contradict itself, and ra- 
tional self-consistency must restrain Him in 
the case of the sinning soul. Sin, being in 
spite of God, is then no denial either of God's 
goodness or of God's power. 

This is all that is needed to make the true 
theodicy. We need but to find, as we have 
found, that sin is no denial of God. And in 
finding that it is no denial of His goodness or 
His power, we have found that it is no denial 
at all of Him. For the dilemma of Divine 
goodness and power is the only real question 
propounded by sin. All other questions which 
sin occasions in regard to God gather them- 
selves up in that. The question, for instance, 
reflected in the word theodicy, of Divine just- 
ice and the injustice in the world, is simply a 
question of the defiance of a just and good God 
by unjust sin with its acts and consequences. 
It is a question of defiant sin and God. And 
defiant sin is the problem in natural evil, which 
flows from sin, and punishes sin, and vindicates 
the universe against sin, and reveals God set 



POWER OF GOD AND THEODICY 113 

over against sin. Natural evil, flowing from 
sin, and occasioned by sin, is no denial of God 
if sin is not a denial of Him. And now we 
see that defiant sin itself is no denial of either 
God's goodness or God's power. The most 
we could admit was that it was a seeming 
denial, for God is as real as the sin which 
would seem to deny Him. But now we see 
that it is not even a seeming denial, for it is 
no denial of His power that He does not pre- 
vent sin, if as Creator He is rationally with- 
held from doing it. And it is no denial of His 
goodness that He with holy and loving pur- 
pose and in view of the Redemption creates 
the soul whose sin He cannot prevent. The 
theodicy is therefore complete. 



VII 
THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 

THERE remains, however, another ques- 
tion. Is it not possible to find sin not 
only no denial of God, but even a 
positive witness to God ? For there are many 
who have never believed that sin really denied 
God, who have nevertheless felt vague mis- 
givings and doubts because of sin. There are 
many for whom sin has not shut off the sight 
of God, but to whom it has obscured Him. 
If sin could be found not only no denial of 
God, but even a positive witness to God, this 
would blot out that cloud upon the blaze of 
His existence. For the mind, when all else is 
a witness to God, is perplexed by this human 
sin which seems not to be a witness. 

Sin is, as we have seen, a witness to God's 
goodness in the creation of the soul for holi- 
ness. But in regard to Divine power, though 
sin does not deny Divine power, it does not 

114 



THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 115 

appear as a witness to it. If it did, it would 
meet that vague doubt whether, though His 
consistency as Creator removes sin's dilemma 
and denial of God, we can clearly see God at 
all as the Creator of such a soul, — a soul which 
can take advantage of Creative consistency to 
defy Divine power. It is a doubt whether we 
can really see God's power acting in the crea- 
tion of the soul which can defy, even though it 
cannot deny, Divine power. All other things, 
the movement and balance of the heavens, the 
long ages of geology, the marvels of the earth, 
the detail of plant and animal life, the courses 
of history, are witnesses to Divine power back 
of them. The soul alone, which receives all 
this testimony, by its defiance seems not to 
set forth but to obscure Divine power. It is 
a less tangible question, and yet a more fund- 
amental one, as to the existence of Divine 
power, than was the question of the dilemma. 
For that, though it denied, only denied that 
Divine power over the soul could be omnipo- 
tence, while this, though it only questions or 
doubts, questions or doubts any Divine power 



116 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

at all back of the defiant soul. While all that 
can be demanded in the true theodicy is that 
it should show that sin does not deny God, yet 
if sin could be shown as a positive witness to 
God, to His power, as it is already to His 
goodness, this revelation would be of yet 
greater service both to the believer in God and 
to the unbeliever, by removing that vaguer but 
more fundamental doubt in regard to His ex- 
istence. Can human sin be found such a wit- 
ness to God ? We can already see plainly His 
goodness in sin ; can we see plainly His power ? 
His goodness appears even in the soul's sin; 
does His power equally appear even in the 
soul's defiance? To find whether it does we 
must follow yet further an untrodden path. 

The paradox, that, where all else reveals 
God's power, man by his defiance should ob- 
scure God's power, is heightened when we re- 
member that man seems in every other way to 
be the greatest creation of God's power known 
to us. 

The Scripture closes the creation, which 
began with "Let there be Light," with the 



THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 117 

climax that " God made man in His own 
image." Even in the evolutionary view of 
the ages, man is the goal of the creative work. 
Philosophers and poets have shown that they 
regarded man as the greatest work of God 
known to us, by making him the subject of 
their epic and their drama, their histories and 
romances, and the region and matter of their 
philosophy. The attitude of philosophy was 
well summed up, if one takes " the world " to 
mean the created world, by the recent philoso- 
pher who liked to say, " In the world there is 
nothing great but man; in man there is noth- 
ing great but mind," that is, " but the soul of 
man." And yet the soul of man, which in 
other respects seems the highest work of God, 
seems by its attitude towards Him, by its de- 
fiance in sin, to obscure Divine power in its 
creation. 

Now if there is any principle in the nature 
of creative work which will explain this ob- 
scure paradox, that the seemingly greatest cre- 
ation of Divine power should be one which 
can defy that power, we evidently cannot find 



113 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

it first in the case of the soul itself. If we 
could, we should not have had the problem. 
We cannot really analyse the creation of the 
soul, obscured as it is by the impenetrable 
light of its creator, by the primeval mist of its 
beginning, and by its present sin. If we would 
find some principle in the nature of a creation 
which will explain this paradox, we must find 
it first in some other realm, where its working 
is self-evident. 

And we do not have to look far for such a 
realm, for the human soul itself has, as a 
divinest portion of its birthright, the power to 
create. The " creative imagination " is the 
perpetual mirror of the Creative Power which 
made us. This creative imagination, being of 
the very fibre and substance of the soul, works 
in every part of our lives, and in many cases 
its workings cannot be disentangled from the 
general strand of our activities. The range of 
its work runs from the most mechanical acts, 
in which it plays a very minor part, up to those 
acts which are pure creation. For there are 
acts in which the creative imagination is su- 



THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 119 

preme, directing the whole man as its rapt and 
inspired instrument, and in these acts it works 
freely and truly according to the pure princi- 
ples of creative work. 

Nor do we have to look far for this truest 
creative activity of man. It lies unquestion- 
ably in the arts, which are the peculiar province 
of the creative imagination. This is so uni- 
versally recognised that it is almost a sufficient 
definition of the arts, in a broad sense, to say 
that they are the creative work of man. In 
them the creative imagination is in its king- 
dom, not hampered by the chains of logic or 
the purposes of the will, but directing intellect 
and will as its servants, and bound only by its 
own nature and its own higher law and logic. 
It is, however, as we see at once, subject to 
certain limitations of the senses through which 
it must make its appeal to other minds. And 
because of this necessity it must work in ma- 
terials which are not its own creation, for by 
these materials of sound or colour or form it 
must touch the senses. To the extent to which 
it must use these materials its purely creative 



120 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

action is made, though not necessarily less 
real, at least less visible. And the ways in 
which these modes and mediums have affected 
the purely creative character of the arts have 
given rise to all the endless theories of art. 
Just how shall the creative imagination appeal, 
legitimately and effectively, to other minds, 
and what are its proper relations to its materi- 
als of sound or colour or form ? How far on 
the one hand may the creative spirit transcend 
its materials, and overleap the barriers between 
one art and another? And how far on the 
other hand shall it be restrained by the idiom 
of the particular vehicle which it uses? These 
questions, with which it is the work of theories 
of art to deal, have very little to do with the 
pure principles of creative work, which belong 
to the nature of the soul itself and not to the 
nature of its materials. And while creative 
vigour varies not with the art but with the man 
who wields the art, we may say that the art 
which is least affected by modes and mediums, 
which has the least of its work made ready to 
its hand in already existent sound or colour or 



THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 121 

solid substance, and is most sufficient to itself, 
is the most purely creative art. 

And the most purely creative art, of which 
these things are true, stands out unmistakably 
from all the others. Its name marks it in this 
way. For the ancient Greeks, whose criticism 
was as perfect as their creative work, and 
whose divisions of the arts have never been 
outworn, when they distinguished the arts, 
named the artists by what the artists did, as 
sculptors, painters, architects, musicians, and 
their work they called sculpture, painting, 
architecture, music. But they separated one 
art from the others, and called those who prac- 
tised it simply " poietai," " makers " or " crea- 
tors," and their work "poiesis," "poesy," or 
" creation." The reason was that to them the 
poet, the maker, worked in pure creation. His 
works were not wrought out of materials, of 
form, or colour, or even of sound, for though 
they had sound, it was but a garment, and not, 
as in music, the living body itself of the art. 
They were bodied forth directly by the imag- 
ination, to which words were but symbols, and 



122 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

these symbols themselves the work of the 
creative imagination, partly of the people at 
large, and partly of the poet who fused and 
remoulded the words. The Greeks therefore, 
by a distinction which has never been ques- 
tioned, called the art which dealt in no materi- 
als, but only in the imagination, " poetry," or 
" creation," and its artist " poietes," or " crea- 
tor." Poetry is, indeed, the most simple and 
purely creative work known to man. We 
may look to find the principles of creative 
work most clearly revealed in poetry. 

When we speak of the creative art of poetry, 
we remember at once that there is a certain 
line of cleavage in poetry. Some poetry is al- 
most entirely a creation, and some is largely 
the expression of the soul. We have agreed, 
following the Greeks again, to call these two 
great classes of poetry dramatic and lyric, by 
a distinction lying in the very nature of poetry. 
Poetry may be defined sufficiently for our pur- 
poses as a creative expression of the soul ; but 
lyric poetry is especially expression, the out- 
pouring of the soul, while dramatic poetry, 



THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 123 

whose work is the imaging of other souls, 
whether in drama, epic, or other form, is es- 
sentially creation. All best poetry is both ex- 
pression and creation; it is the truest expres- 
sion of the soul, in the best creative and poetic 
form. Great lyric poetry, however outpour- 
ing or passionate, is never formless, but is 
clothed in noble or splendid form by the crea- 
tive imagination, and great dramatic poetry is 
made alive and is fired by the life and passion 
of the poet's own soul. In all the highest 
works of poetry creation and expression are 
found in one. 

It is because the life of poetry is the poet's 
own life that poetry cannot be made by rule. 
Poetry made in that way, as it was in the 
time of Pope, is instinct not with life but with 
rule and propriety. Neither for this reason 
can it be made, as many in recent times in 
France and England have tried to make it, 
by art alone. Such poetry, though the charm 
of art may preserve it as a perfect, melodious, 
highly coloured handiwork, will not live, and 
cannot be said even now to live, for it has not 



124 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

the poet's own life in it. He moulded it, 
and coloured it, and made it musical, but for- 
got to put his soul into it. For the power of 
poetry flows always from the poet's own life 
of power, so that, as Milton says, to write 
great poetry a man ought himself to be a true 
poem. If we would find to what rapid fervour 
or what aerial heights the poet's own soul may 
bring his poetry, we need only to turn to Pin- 
dar, with his rush of molten imagery, or to 
Shelley, upborne on the winds of imagination, 
skylark and eagle at once in one musical flight. 
And if we would find the outbursts of the 
poet's own heart reaching an unsurpassed pitch 
of greatness, we may come to more than one 
fierce apostrophe or adoring vision of Dante, 
or to the storm of prophecy in Lycidas, or the 
rapture and pathos of the blind Milton's hymn 
to the uncreated light. If we may judge by the 
past, poetry cannot go above such heights as 
these, reached by the nature of the poet him- 
self. 

Yet we cannot stop here, and say that the 
power of the poet's own life in his poetry is 



THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 125 

the whole secret of greatness in poetry. Dante 
with his " Rose of the Redeemed/' and Milton 
with his " Hail, Holy Light/' may reach 
diviner heights than Lear in the storm or Hec- 
tor at the gate of the ships. Yet Homer and 
Shakespeare, who are known to us almost en- 
tirely through creative forms, have rank un- 
passed in that immortal company. For it is 
as creators that they all have place in their 
high collateral glory. Homer has held the 
ages under his spell because he created a world, 
of men and gods, of seas and lands. Shake- 
speare created, for his marvellous stage, not a 
world, but human nature itself, individual and 
universal. That which set the impress of the 
" Divine Comedy " upon Europe, so that the 
Renaissance was but the expanded soul of 
Dante, was the vast and intense reality of his 
work ; it was the fact that those circles of hell, 
that mount of purgation, those orbs of heaven, 
and all that multitude of beings, lived, a new- 
created world. And " Paradise Lost " has 
moulded succeeding religion and character be- 
cause Milton bodied forth by his creative imag- 



126 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

ination a whole universe, so that men live in it 
to-day whether they will or not. The greatest 
power of the soul in poetry is shown, then, in 
creative forms. The world of Homer, the 
worlds of Dante, the human cosmos of Shakes- 
peare, the religious universe of Milton, filled 
as they are with the life of the poet himself, 
are among the supreme works of creative power 
in poetry because they are, above all, creations. 
In such creative works, filled by the creator's 
own life, and yet living as creations outside of 
and beyond himself, we have the highest attain- 
ments of human creative power. And as 
supreme works of the creative imagination they 
bear the creative stamp in every part. Even 
those outbursts in Dante and Milton, where 
the poet's own soul ascends almost beyond 
words, are clothed in creative forms. The 
poet's passion is revealed not in de- 
scription of itself but in vivid depiction 
of the objects of the passion. And yet the 
passion is the poet's own. It is the poet's 
own soul which arises in such apocalypse be- 
fore us. The soul is here revealing the great- 



THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 127 

ness of its spiritual nature rather than the 
greatness of its creative power. For the soul 
reveals its creative power at its greatest when 
at or near these heights of its own nature it 
produces other souls, its creations, filled with 
this same ardent life, and feeling these passions 
and aspirations as their own. The creative 
imagination can never, perhaps, lift any im- 
agined soul into the greatest heights. Cer- 
tainly neither Othello nor Lear nor any other 
creation of man ever rose to the full soul- 
height of Dante or Milton themselves. And if 
the creative imagination could lift these im- 
agined souls to the level of the highest actual 
souls, it would exhaust the ideal of human 
creation and attain the unattainable. But not 
far below this highest point the creative poet, 
the " maker," can do his greatest work. He 
can make the souls which he images see with 
their own eyes, think their own thoughts, speak 
their own words, and feel the most poign- 
ant, the most profound, the most inspired 
passions as their very own. He can thus trans- 
form his own most intense life into the life of 



128 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

his creations. Then at last man has done his 
greatest creative work. For this power to 
bring into being, even though only in imagi- 
nation, souls which are not our own, and 
which did not exist, and to make them live with 
a vitality which was ours, but has become 
theirs, — this power is, more than any other 
which is given to us, like the Power which 
made the universe, and created worlds out of 
we know not what, and brought into life, from 
its own life, beings who had not been. 

The distinctive nature of this highest work 
of the creative poet, who creates souls which 
are not himself and which yet have life from 
his own life, is made still clearer by compari- 
son with those creations which fall below the 
highest. The creative imagination is common- 
est in childhood, and in the child who lives in 
a world of picturesque and vivid unrealities we 
have a good example of a mind most imagina- 
tive, but only slightly creative. For while the 
child imagines many beings of many sorts, 
with a realism astonishing to us, it fills them 
all with its own naive and fanciful life, and 



THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 129 

gives to them its own feelings, its own views 
of things, and its own atmosphere. They do 
not live a distinct created existence; radiant, 
grotesque, gigantic, prosaic, they share alike 
the nature of the child. We do not need to 
go for similar instances in poetry to the many 
poets whose impulse is lyric, and who by pref- 
erence sing rather than create, for among 
those whose work is in the creative forms we 
have an instance of a peculiar falling short of 
great creative work. This instance is Byron. 
We feel in his works a splendid and elemental 
force, a power and an intensity truly unknown 
to our day. And yet we feel in them an equal 
failure of creative power, for with all his power 
in them they are not distinct created person- 
alities. His characters are for the most part 
but so many passionate aspects of Byron. 
Their personality, their thoughts, their feel- 
ings, are his. In this Byron is like the child 
whose imaginations all share the child's nature. 
But if it happens that the child, who, because 
he is a child, has something of the poet's na- 
ture, is to grow into a true poet, and a creative 



130 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

poet, his creations become, with the growth of 
his creative power, more and more distinct 
from himself in personality. The greater his 
creative power, the more his creations stand 
out, objectively, as we say, having wholly their 
own mind and character. And at last when 
we come to those creations which the world has 
chosen to call supreme, we find each one a 
rounded, vivid, separate being, distinct alike 
from the others and from the poet who created 
them. Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Lear, Ham- 
let, Othello, Iago, Mephistopheles, Milton's 
Satan, — these supreme works of creative 
power are in their personality almost entirely 
distinct from their creators. We may say then 
that, as we have found them, the greatest crea- 
tive works are those which are most distinct 
from their creators in personality. It is true 
that these greatest creations are apart not only 
from less distinct creations, but also from cer- 
tain almost equally distinct characters of Euri- 
pides, Moliere and Schiller, because these three 
poets lacked in their own souls the sustained 
vision of Homer, the intense religion of Dante, 



THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 131 

the grandeur of Milton, the universal grasp 
of Shakespeare. And it is true also that three 
of the supreme poets, Aeschylus, Sophocles, 
Goethe, fall below the highest in their crea- 
tions, because the souls of the great four are 
above even these in loftiness, immensity and 
ardour. We must combine our principle of 
distinct personality, then, as a measure of 
greatness in a creation, with the condition that 
this greatness also depends upon the greatness 
of the life of the poet within the creation. And 
we may now formulate the principle of great- 
ness in a creation as we have found it, in this, 
that the greatest creation is that which, having 
the greatest life from its creator, is most dis- 
tinct from him in personality. 

But by this principle the greatness of a crea- 
tion varies not only with the poet's creative 
power, but with the greatness of his spiritual 
nature as seen in the creation. If we could, in 
order to have a test of creative power, regard 
the greatness of the creator's spiritual nature 
as a fixed quantity, we should have a principle 
by which creations would be the measure sim- 



132 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

ply of the creative power which wrought in 
them. And this principle would be that, grant- 
ing the creator's life in the creation, the great- 
est creation, as a work of creative power, is 
that which is most distinct in personality from 
the creator. And it appears that we may still 
have an example of this simplified principle in 
the work of the four supreme poets, and may 
regard the life which they put into their crea- 
tions as a fixed quantity. For, either because 
they are all so far above us that we cannot 
measure them, or because they are alike in 
greatness of soul, we cannot declare that the 
soul of any one of them, as revealed in his 
creations, is greater than that of the others. 
They are different, and we may have personal 
preferences, but, so far as the world can tell, 
they are equal. Finding then these creations 
equal in the greatness of the poet's life in them, 
we may look for the final distinction which the 
creative principle of distinctness of personality 
makes among them. And we find that the 
creations of Shakespeare stand out as greater 
than the others in this regard. Homer's figures 



THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 133 

have lived through the ages, clear, individ- 
ual, personal. Yet compared with the highest 
standard they all have a little of the charac- 
teristics of Homer. They all delight in the 
same things which Homer, as revealed in his 
own words, not theirs, delighted in. Dante's 
characters are of intense and vivid reality, 
each a distinct person; yet from the number 
of them, the short space in the poem given to 
each, and the fact that they all, however dis- 
tinct, are heard through Dante's ears, and have 
the atmosphere of Dante's theme, the whole 
gallery of his characters has the effect of 
Dante's personality. If Dante's characters are 
all imperceptibly Dantesque, Milton's portrait- 
ure is all to a certain degree Miltonic. This 
may be partly because he deals less with per- 
sonal beings than with spaces, worlds, chaos, 
Eden, Heaven and Hell ; and still more because 
his personal beings are Divine or angelic, and 
therefore incapable of such distinctness of 
human personality in our thought, or else typi- 
cal, like Adam and Eve, with any marked indi- 
viduality as yet undeveloped. And even in 



134 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

Satan, . v: and gigantic personality, be- 

yond anything in Dante because of the greater 
scale and length of the portrayal, something 

his grandeur is o\v Milton's own, per- 

verted hi:*. :ice of Milton's God. But 

Shakespeare's creations are to our eyes abso- 
nct in mind, and will, and habit, so 
much SO that we hardly know from his plays 

at Shakespeare's personality was, Cer- 
my one of his creations, Hamlet, for 
instance, is Shakespeare's own personality, 
then Orhe' I Lear, and Macbeth, and a 

score of others, utterly distinct and dissimilar, 
cannot be. He has by his creative power 
transformed his own life in his works into what 
seem to us absolutely distinct personalities. 
And therefore, though he shows no greater 
soul of '.-.is own, and never rose perhaps to the 
heights which Dante ; o attain, his crea- 

tions are the greatest of all, because of th 
distinctness from himself. And the world, 
recognising that poetry is a creative art, has 
held Shakespeare as the greatest of all poets. 
We have come, then, in the most creative 



the creative principle iss 

realm of human cr power ^preme 

principle, that the greatest create that 

which, having the fullest life from the creator, 
most disrinrt from him in personality; the 
life the expre-. :,. the d ness 

the re i . creative power. It re- 

mains now for ; vhether this principle 

will explain the paradox ol & ^oul 

apparently greatest creation. 



VIII 
THE WITNESS OF SIN 

BEFORE we apply this principle, found 
in human creative work, to Divine cre- 
ative work, we ought to make sure just 
what force the principle has there. It unques- 
tionably has the force of analogy. For there 
is a very complete analogy between man's cre- 
ative work and God's. Man's creative work is 
but the type and shadow of God's, with the one 
great difference between them that the creative 
imagination creates imaginary life and God cre- 
ates real life. But its force is much greater 
than that of analogy. It does not depend upon 
a general likeness between human and Divine 
creative work, but lies rather in the very nature 
of creative work. The principle would doubt- 
less be conclusive enough if it clearly revealed 
itself as true in the case of Divine creation 
which we wish explained. But we may also 

136 



THE WITNESS OF SIN 137 

find it self-evidently true, as an abstract prin- 
ciple, lying in the very nature of things, and of 
creative work, and therefore absolutely con- 
clusive if it explains the case of the defiant 
soul as a Divine creation. 

Let us take the principle: The greatest cre- 
ation is that which, having the fullest life from 
the creator, is most distinct from him in per- 
sonality. Now it is clear, in regard to the 
first part of the principle, that, in the nature of 
things, the more of his own life a creator puts 
into his creation, which has all its life from 
him, the greater that living thing which he cre- 
ates will be. And the greatest creation in this 
respect will be that into which he has put the 
most of his own life. The second part of the 
principle, also, that of distinctness from the cre- 
ator in personality, is equally self-evident. 
For the more his creative power does in a cre- 
ation, making it less and less a mere part of 
himself, and more and more a distinct and sep- 
arate created work, the greater work of cre- 
ative power that creation will be. And of 
course the greatest creation, as a work of ere- 



138 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

ative power, will be that in which his creative 
power has wrought the most, and made the 
creation most distinctly a creation, and most 
distinct from himself. And as a whole, a cre- 
ator's greatest creative work will be that in 
which, while he has put the most of his own 
life into it, and made it therefore a living being, 
his creative power has also wrought most, and 
made this living being most distinctly a crea- 
tion and most distinct in personality from him- 
self. The principle is self-evident, not only in 
human creative work, but as an abstract prin- 
ciple, in the very nature of things. 

We may bring this principle as self-evident, 
then, to the case of that apparently Divine cre- 
ation, the human soul. How does the princi- 
ple affect the paradox, which is our problem 
of theodicy, that the soul of man, which de- 
fies God, seems yet His greatest known crea- 
tion ? Applied to this supreme case, the prin- 
ciple is more clearly and luminously evident 
than anywhere else. For in the first place man, 
as a creation of God, is more filled with his 
Maker's own life than is any other creation 



THE WITNESS OF SIN 139 

which we know. He differs in this from the 
earth, the stars, the whole firmament, because 
he has sentient life. He is apart from all 
unconscious life, as of plants, for he realizes. 
He differs also by an immeasurable gulf from 
all merely conscious animal life, for he has 
personal life. And beside all this he is con- 
scious that he has immortal life, such as could 
have come to him only from Divine life, 
breathed into him by his Creator. And yet, 
for the other part of the principle, man, with 
all this life from his Creator's life, is distinct 
from his Creator in personality, so distinct 
that he can even defy Him! It seemed a 
strange and profound paradox; but now it is 
the most vivid embodiment which we know 
of that creative principle of distinctness of 
created personality. Man is so distinct from 
his Creator in personal mind, and personal will, 
and personal power of choice, that he can actu- 
ally work in opposition to his Maker's will, and 
choose evil in defiance of Him and all His 
power. There could be no greater distinct- 
ness of personality, and no more striking exhi- 



140 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

bition of the work of creative power than this 
created free will which is thus able to defy 
God. Man becomes indeed the supreme evi- 
dence of Divine creative power. We have but 
to compare him with the vast inanimate uni- 
verse, the visible evidence, we think, of God's 
power, but which, though it has not God's 
kind of life in it, can yet have no will but 
God's will, while man, who has God's life in 
him, yet has his own free will, able even to defy 
God's will. Leaving out higher orders of 
moral beings, man is, of all things known to 
us, the greatest work of the power of God, 
which could create so free and distinct a per- 
sonality. 

That vague doubt, therefore, which is the 
furthest and yet the most fundamental reach 
of the question of defiant sin and God, the 
doubt whether we can rationally see any 
Divine power acting in the creation of the soul 
which can defy a Divine Creator's pow r er, is 
dissolved by this new light. The defiant sin- 
ning soul no longer obscures the Power which 
it defies, for in its very defiance it appears as 



THE WITNESS OF SIN 141 

a supreme work and revelation of that Power. 
In the very distinctness of personality which 
can act against its Creator's will, and defy 
Him, the soul reveals His power. The soul, 
by its faculty of choice and its power of defi- 
ance, is a witness, and in its use of that power 
of defiance an active witness, to the power of 
God who made it. It is, in this marvellous 
freedom and distinctness of personality, al- 
most a proof, if we logically needed a proof, 
that God's power is omnipotence. For it is 
questionable whether anything but infinite 
power could have so combined life from 
God's own life with such completely distinct 
and separate will. But short of this, it is very 
clear that the soul's defiance can raise no doubt 
at all as to Divine power in its creation, but is 
rather a witness, the highest witness in crea- 
tion, to God's power. 

We have therefore a theodicy of witness 
to remove the obscuring doubt of God, as we 
had a theodicy of defence to dissolve the 
dilemma and its denial of God. Sin, being 
in spite of God, is now not only no denial that 



142 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

God's goodness and power are infinite, but is 
a positive witness to His goodness and power. 
It invokes the testimony of conscience to the 
goodness of God. It arouses God's protest in 
natural evil, which is the protest of Divine 
goodness. And it exhibits His goodness in 
the creation of moral beings. For Divine 
goodness in all its breadth of holiness and love 
is revealed in the creation of moral beings with 
power to sin and consequent power to be holy. 
And though sin is in spite of God, it not only 
is no denial of Divine power, but is now a 
positive witness to His power. Restrained in 
regard to the soul by creative self-consistency, 
which denies neither perfect goodness nor om- 
nipotence in Him, the Creator appears Divinely 
good and Divinely full of power in creating 
the free soul. As we see Divine goodness in 
the Creator's holy and loving purpose in creat- 
ing moral beings with personal will, so equally 
we see Divine power in his ability to create 
such beings. In our souls, made to be holy, 
though now sinning, we see Divine good pur- 
pose carried out by Divine power. Our defi- 



THE WITNESS OF SIN 143 

ant power of choice, acting in spite of the 
Creator, praises Him in spite of itself. Our 
very sins, the perverted sinful outworkings of 
that faculty of choice, glorify Him with a cloud 
of unwilling voices. This is the witness of sin 
to God's goodness and God's power. 

There remains but one question about the 
theodicy. In our souls, made to be holy, but 
now sinning in spite of God, we truly see 
Divine good purpose carried out by Divine 
power. This, with God's creative self-consis- 
tency, forms the whole theodicy of defence 
and of positive witness. But may there not 
be some final question of the reality of a 
Divine good purpose in the creation of souls 
for holiness, when we see no soul holy, but all 
unholy? And must not God's self-consistency 
as Creator, which keeps Him from breaking off 
His creative purpose, require also some carry- 
ing out of that purpose? And has not God 
laid some responsibility upon Himself in cre- 
ating, even with a holy and loving purpose, a 
race of souls the possibility of whose sin He 
cannot prevent? These three questions are 



144 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

really one, and to them all there is but one 
answer, the Redemption. 

For each of these questions, which concern 
not details but the general aspect and reality 
of the theodicy, finds its complete answer in 
the Redemption. In regard to the first ques- 
tion, of the reality of a Divine good purpose 
in the creation of human souls for holiness 
when we see no souls holy, but all unholy, we 
must admit the fairness of the question. We 
could not clearly see Divine good purpose in a 
purpose which ended entirely in ruin and fail- 
ure, with no soul attaining holiness. It might 
not be in God's power to accomplish that pur- 
pose in every free soul ; but with no soul attain- 
ing it, that holy purpose would seem unreal. 
But the redemption from sin into holiness gives 
reality to that creative purpose. For if God in 
creating moral beings with human holiness as 
the final aim foresees not only sin, but a final 
saving from sin, and a final holiness, through 
the Redemption, there can be no question of the 
reality of His good purpose in creating moral 
beings. 



THE WITNESS OF SIN 145 

The next question concerns the complete 
reality of that creative self-consistency which 
dissolves the dilemma of sin. If God's self- 
consistency restrains Him, in the case of these 
sinning souls, because He cannot rationally 
destroy them with His creative purpose wholly 
unaccomplished, must not the same self-con- 
sistency require at least some final accomplish- 
ment of that great and holy purpose? It 
certainly seems so, and the answer again is 
found in the Redemption. For in the Redemp- 
tion there is some final accomplishment, and 
the largest one possible, of that purpose. We 
cannot demand, either for His self-consistency, 
or for the reality of His creative purpose, that 
He should be able to accomplish that purpose 
in all the defiant souls of the race. Any real 
accomplishment of that purpose meets the de- 
mand of reason. 

And the third question concerns the com- 
plete reality of Divine goodness, in face of 
sin, in this theodicy. For though sin is in 
spite of God, and His purpose in creating souls 
which can sin is wholly good, does He not lay 



146 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

some responsibility for sin upon Himself, in 
creating, even with a holy and loving purpose, 
a race of souls the possibility of whose sin, 
and the foreseen actuality of whose sin, He 
cannot prevent? The answer to this question, 
as we have already seen in first speaking of 
God's creative purpose, 1 lies also in the Re- 
demption. It is doubtful how great that 
responsibility is. For His creative purpose 
does not and cannot include sin. Man makes 
sin. God but forsees it, and His only respon- 
sibility is the very remote one that He creates, 
with a holy and loving purpose, a race of beings 
the possibility of whose foreseen wilful sin He 
cannot in His self-consistency directly prevent. 
But He does by the Redemption make the only 
direct prevention of sin possible to Him. And 
His creative purpose, although it does not in- 
clude sin, does include the Redemption. And 
He meets His mere shadow of responsibility, 
incurred also as it is with a loving purpose, by 
the overwhelming gift of Himself. In the 
light of this sacrifice of Himself in the person 

1 Chapter IV. 



THE WITNESS OF SIN 147 

of His Son dearer than Himself upon the cross, 
God's purpose and plan of creation appears, 
both to the heart and to the reason, infinitely 
more wondrous in goodness and love than if 
it meant no sin and included no Redemption. 
Divine holiness and love are visible already in 
God's purpose in the soul, but when they are 
carried out into complete reality in the Redemp- 
tion they become glorious beyond all thought. 
The Redemption sets then the final seal of 
reality upon the theodicy. It gives complete 
reality to the holy purpose of the soul's crea- 
tion, and reveals completely the self-consistency 
of the Creator, and dissolves the last doubt 
of His goodness in creating souls which can 
sin. In finding in the Redemption the final 
reality of the theodicy, we are not trying to 
make the theodicy contribute to the Redemp- 
tion. It is for us to take whatever is needed, 
and can rationally be so taken, for the true 
theodicy; and the Redemption, the great doc- 
trine of Christianity, is needed for the reality 
of the theodicy, and is in harmony with all the 
terms of the problem, the goodness of God, the 



148 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

power of God, the self-consistency of God, and 
the freedom and sin of the soul. If we reject 
that truth of the Redemption, simply because 
it is revealed religion, we lose all hope of a 
true and real theodicy. If we desire a the- 
odicy absolutely real as well as complete, we 
must take the Redemption. It is true that the 
Redemption is by no means, as some seem to 
think, a theodicy in itself. The saving of souls 
from sin, even if all souls could be saved, is not 
an explanation of sin. The Redemption is 
meant to be in itself not an explanation of sin, 
but a way of escape from sin. But it is the 
crowning reality of the theodicy. 

The Redemption or Atonement is the crown- 
ing reality of the theodicy because it is the 
carrying out of the great creative purpose. It 
cannot be called in itself the purpose of the 
creation, but is rather a part, and perhaps, in 
its exercise of Divine goodness at least, the 
largest part of the creative work. For the 
creative purpose, meaningless and incomplete 
without it, is with it complete and glorious. 
Creation and Redemption are in the largest 



THE WITNESS OF SIN 149 

sense one great creative work, the crea- 
tion of a universe of free and adoring beings, 
of which the first creation is the beginning and 
the Redemption is the climax. Certainly this 
is rational, for the Redemption is as consistent 
with the holiness and love and power of God 
as the first creation is, and is a rational and 
consistent carrying out of the creative purpose. 
And it is of the greatest import that the Scrip- 
tures, which reveal the Redemption, show it as 
the climax of the creative work, and the Cre- 
ator and the Redeemer as one and the same 
person, even among the united persons of the 
Trinity. Christ, the Son, the Logos, who is 
the Redeemer, is also the Creator. " For," 
says John, " all things were made through 
Him, and without Him was not anything made 
that hath been made." And Paul declares, 
" For in Him were all things created, in the 
heavens and upon the earth, things visible and 
things invisible." Creator and Redeemer are 
one, as creation and Redemption are one. He 
makes holy in the Redemption those whom 
He made free and moral in the creation. And 



150 THE WITNESS OF SIN 

He makes them free again, the Scripture says, 
from the bondage of the will in sin. " If any 
man is in Christ," it is declared, he is therefore 
" a new creation." And in one profound sen- 
tence, seldom understood, the Scripture gathers 
up this whole true theodicy, showing how in 
the Redemption the Creator and Redeemer fin- 
ishes and makes eternal His great creative 
work ; " for by one offering He hath perfected 
forever them who are made holy." And again 
in the Apocalypse, in the great hymn of the 
theodicy before the throne of God, beginning 
with the worship of Deity, and proceeding in 
choruses of ever-increasing multitudes, through 
the Creation, — " for thou didst create all 
things, and because of thy will they were, and 
were created," — and the Redemption, — " for 
thou wast slain, and didst purchase with thy 
blood men of every tribe," — and the adoration 
of " the Lamb that hath been slain," — to the 
chant of the whole animate universe "unto 
Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the 
Lamb," the Redeemer, — in this hymn, as pro- 
found and as broad in its history of the uni- 



THE WITNESS OF SIN 151 

verse as the Epistle to the Romans, is revealed 
the whole sweep of the Divine creative work. 

It is rational to take the testimony of the 
Scriptures, which reveal to us all that we really 
know of either creation or Redemption, and 
which make the two one great creative and 
successive work. But simply for the theodicy, 
this supreme problem of human thought, this 
problem of the goodness and power of God, 
the Redemption is the final and logical reality. 
It gives to the complete theodicy the breath of 
life. We see the Creator revealed in goodness 
and power in the creation of the soul which can 
sin, unable consistently to prevent sin by co- 
ercion, but protesting against it in natural evil, 
and carrying out His creation, His consistency, 
His protest, and His purpose, and supremely 
revealing his goodness and power, in the 
Redemption. 



IMPORTANT ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES 

The Universal Elements of the Christian 
Religion 

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Paths to Power 

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needed." — Metkcdist Times. 



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Our Attitude as Pastors SSSJ^Sl 

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Torrey and Alexander ^ e rl s d !°^ d o e f ^ Tiva , 

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Interesting facts in stirring language. 

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IDEALS OF LIFE AND CONDUCT 



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THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 



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BIBLICAL STUDIES. 



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